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The Long-Term Costs of Government Surveillance: Insights from Stasi Spying in East Germany

Despite the prevalence of government surveillance systems around the world, causal evidence on their social and economic consequences is lacking. Using county-level variation in the number of Stasi informers within Socialist East Germany during the 1980s and accounting for potential endogeneity, we show that more intense regional surveillance led to lower levels of trust and reduced social activity ...

Many refugees have work experience but a smaller share possess formal vocational qualifications

Academic and vocational qualifications play a crucial role when it comes to successfully integrating refugees and other migrants into society. What qualifications did migrants already acquire in their country of origin and which did they obtain in Germany? And to what extent are qualifications gained abroad recognized in Germany? The IAB-SOEP Migration Sample shows that the majority of the migrant ...

Language acquisition: refugees nearly achieve proficiency level of other migrants

Whether they’re looking to participate in social life, enter the German labor market, or obtain relevant training certificates, learning German is a critical part of integration for the majority of refugees—and yet only a handful of studies have examined their language acquisition patterns and skill levels. The IAB-SOEP Migration Sample, which was collected by the Institute for Employment Research ...

Considering Emigration: German university graduates are moving abroad—but only temporarily

Much of the current German debate about the integration of immigrants overlooks the fact that Germany is not solely a country of immigration, but also—and to a substantial degree—a country of emigration. One of the largest groups of emigrants is made up of Germans themselves. The percentage of German natives in the total population of emigrants has risen substantially over the last few years. In 2009, ...

Interdisciplinary Longitudinal Surveys: Linking Individual Date to Organizational Data in Life-Course Analysis

Interdisciplinary Longitudinal Surveys. Linking Individual Data to Organizational Data in Life-Course Analysis

This paper starts with three fundamental insights from social science and economics: (1) that the conditions and consequences of individual behavior can only be studied empirically on the basis of longitudinal data, (2) that individual behavior is embedded in social contexts and social aggregates, and (3) that formal organizations – e.g., firms, schools, universities – are becomming more important ...

Principles of the Just Distribution of Benefits and Burdens: The "Basic Social Justice Orientations" Scale for Measuring Order-Related Social Justice Attitudes

The paper introduces a short scale for measuring attitudes to four fundamental principles of the just distribution of benefits and burdens in a society. The Basic Social Justice Orientations (BSJO) scale is an eight-item scale that measures agreement with the equality, equity, need, and entitlement principle. In contrast to comparable other scales that have been used in justice research in the past, ...

Wages in Eastern Germany Still Considered More Unjust Than in the West

Almost 25 years after the fall of the Wall and far more eastern Germans are unhappy with their income than western Germans. In 2013, around 44 percent of employed eastern Germans rated their earnings as unfair compared with approximately one third in western Germany. Although the east-west gap has been diminishing since 2005--to around 12 percent in 2013--this is not because eastern Germans feel that ...

A Factorial Survey on the Justice of Earnings Within the SOEP-Pretest 2008

This research note describes the Factorial Survey and its implementation in the Pretest 2008 of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). The main research objective of this study was to investigate the capability of Factorial Surveys in large population surveys. Therefore, we created a vignette module that was part of the CAPI-questionnaire with 24 descriptions of fulltime employees. Respondents gave ...

The Justice of Earnings in Dual-Earner Households

The rise in female labor market participation and the growth of “atypical” employment arrangements has, over the last few decades, brought about a steadily decreasing percentage of households in which the man is the sole breadwinner, and a rising percentage of dual-earner households. Against this backdrop, the present paper investigates the impact of household contexts in which the traditional male ...