SOEP-Suche

Effort and Redistribution: Better Cousins Than One Might Have Thought

We use survey and experimental data to explore how effort choices and preferences for redistribution are linked. Under standard preferences, redistribution would reduce effort. This is different with social preferences. Using data from the World Value Survey, we find that respondents with stronger preferences for redistribution tend to have weaker incentives to engage in effort, but that the reverse ...

Overqualification at the Beginning of a Non Academic Working Career. The Efficiency of the German Dual System under Test

Fixed-term contracts as sorting mechanisms: Evidence from job durations in West Germany

Cohort effects and the returns to education in West Germany

Using a Mincer-type wage function, we estimate cohort effects in the returns to education for West German workers born between 1925 and 1974. The main problem to be tackled in the specification is to separately identify cohort, experience, and possibly also age effects in the returns. For women, we find a large and robust decline in schooling premia: in the private sector, the returns to a further ...

Well-being, unemployment, and social interaction: An international comparison

If unemployment is high in an individual's reference group, the moral imperative to work for one's own living may be weakened. Consequently, the psychic costs of unemployment and work incentives are reduced. In this paper, we empirically test this proposition using a survey conducted in almost all European countries. Marginal effects calculated from ordered probit regressions pooled over ...

Gender and Competition

In almost all European Union countries, the gender wage gap is increasing across the wages distribution. In this lecture I briefly survey some recent studies aiming to explain why apparently identical women and men receive such different returns and focus especially on those incorporating pyschological factors as an explanation of the gender gap. Research areas with high potential returns to further ...

There and back again – estimating equivalence scales with measurement error

Using income satisfaction data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we find large differences in the equivalence weight of a partner when it is being estimated by direct and reverse regressions. We argue that neither of the two models will produce consistent estimates when there is stochastic error in satisfaction and measurement error in incomes. We propose a correction of mismeasured incomes using ...

Preferences for Childcare Policies: Theory and Evidence

We analyse preferences for public, private or mixed provision of childcare theoretically and empirically. We model childcare as a publicly provided private good. Richer households should prefer private provision to either pure public or mixed provision. If public provision redistributes from rich to poor, they should favour mixed over pure public provision, but if public provision redistributes from ...

Smarter every day: The deceleration of population ageing in terms of cognition

Cognitive decline correlates with age-associated health risks and has been shown to be a good predictor of future morbidity and mortality. Cognitive functioning can therefore be considered an important measure of differential ageing across cohorts and population groups. Here, we investigate if and why individuals aged 50+ born into more recent cohorts perform better in terms of cognition than their ...

Adequacy of Pension Systems in Europe: An Analysis Based on Comprehensive Replacement Rates

Providing access for all individuals to appropriate pension entitlements, public and/or private, which allow them to maintain, to a reasonable degree, their standard of living after retirement is considered a social policy objective.1 An exploration of the above objective can be performed by comparing the individuals’ living standards when active and when retired. The aim of this paper is to develop ...