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Student Aid, Repayment Obligations and Enrolment in Higher Education in Germany - Evidence from a "Natural Experiment"

Does More Generous Student Aid Increase Enrolment Rates into Higher Education? - Evaluating the German Student Aid Reform of 2001

Trends in Intragenerational Income Mobility in the Western States of Germany and the United States (1984-2006)

Using the Shorrocks R, we compare trends in intragenerational income mobility for the western states of Germany and the United States (1984 – 2006) and test the sensitivity of our results to the starting point and number of years considered. We find that our mobility estimates do not converge to a constant over time so the starting year chosen for the analysis matters. We conclude that income mobility ...

Consolidating the Evidence on Income Mobility in the Western States of Germany and the U.S. from 1984-2006

The cross-national intragenerational income mobility literature assumes within-country mobility is invariant over the period measured. We argue that a great social transformation - German reunification - abruptly and permanently altered economic mobility. Using standard measures of mobility (with panel data for the western states of Germany and the U.S.) over the entire period 1984-2006, we find the ...

The Effects of Union Dissolution on the Economic Resources of Men and Women: A Comparative Analysis of Germany and the United States, 1985–2013

We analyze the consequences of union dissolution on the economic resources of men and women in the United States and Germany over three decades, using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and another international survey, the German Socio-Economic Panel, which was modeled after the PSID. Measured either by family size–adjusted “pregovernment” or “postgovernment” incomes (incomes to men and women ...

Intragenerational mobility and the ratio of permanent to total inequality

This article provides finite sample conditions for the ratio of permanent to total inequality based on methods of Gottschalk and Moffitt (1994) to be equivalent to the Shorrocks R constructed with a Theil General Entropy Index. A simple test emerges of whether the two measures can be seen as equivalent that reveals the implicit social weighting placed on different parts of the income distribution by ...

The life-cycle and the business-cycle of wage risk — Cross-country comparisons

We provide evidence on life-cycle and business-cycle fluctuations in the dispersion of household-level wage innovations, comparing the US, the UK, and Germany. First, we find that household characteristics explain about 25% of the dispersion in wages within an age group in all three countries. Second, the cross-sectional variance of wages is almost linearly increasing in household age in all three ...

Happiness and the Persistence of Income Shocks

We reassess the empirical effects of income and employment on self-reported well-being. Our analysis makes use of a two-step estimation procedure that allows us to apply instrumental variable regressions with ordinal observable data. As suggested by the theory of incomplete markets, we differentiate between the effects of persistent and transitory income shocks. In line with this theory, we find that ...

Which Ladder to Climb? Decomposing Life Cycle Wage Dynamics

Wages grow and become more unequal as workers age. Economic theory focuses on worker investment in human capital, search for employers, and residual wage shocks to account for these life cycle wage dynamics. We highlight the importance of jobs: collections of tasks and duties defined by employers within the production process. We provide empirical evidence that climbing the career ladder toward jobs ...

Factors influencing tenure choice in European countries

Homeownership rates are very different across European countries. They range from below 50% in Germany to over 80% in Greece, Spain or Ireland. However the differences lie not only in the overall homeownership rates but also in its structure, and this is the focus of this paper. Its aim is to study the impact of microeconomic factors on household’s tenure choice, using a cross-country comparative approach. ...