The German Socio-Economic Panel Study is a representative panel study for the German population, collecting data on a broad variety of topics of everyday life, including general wellbeing, household composition, educational aspirations and educational status, income and occupational biographies, leisure time activities, housing, health, political orientation and more. With its long running panel structure, the breadth of topics and the representative nature of the data, the SOEP has become a central resources for quantitative research in the social sciences in Germany.

The German Socio-Economic Panel Study is a representative panel study for the German population, collecting data on a broad variety of topics of everyday life, including general wellbeing, household composition, educational aspirations and educational status, income and occupational biographies, leisure time activities, housing, health, political orientation and more. With its long running panel structure, the breadth of topics and the representative nature of the data, the SOEP has become a central resources for quantitative research in the social sciences in Germany.

This paper empirically analyses the impact of government ownership on competition. The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent governmental equity interventions in the European airline industry provides for a particularly ideal setting to investigate this topic, and this for several reasons. First, airline markets and competition therein are well-defined and well-understood. Second, European countries offered rescue packages differing in size and scope; several countries provided sizable equity interventions to their national airlines - in total, around 13.7 bn €. We present preliminary results on how these equity interventions affected competitive outcomes.

(jont work with Albert Banal-Estanol, Wolfgang Grimme, Sven Maertens, Jo Seldeslachts)

This paper exploits unique variation induced by two information treatments on a sample of German households in 2017 and 2018 to evaluate how subjective belief formation about stock market returns affects stock market participation and portfolio choice. I find that on average the information treatments do not shift individual expectations about returns significantly. Additionally, I show that responses to treatment are highly heterogeneous and that respondents can be classified into three different groups based on how they incorporate the additional information into their beliefs. Lastly, I illustrate that integrating biased beliefs formation in a standard portfolio choice life cycle framework can help to explain a significant part of the anomalies of the households investment behavior like low participation rates and relatively constant risky portfolio shares across age and wealth distribution.

To promote integration, the German government enacted the Residential Obligation Act (Wohnsitzauflage) in 2016, which obliges refugees to maintain their residence in the states to which they have been assigned for a period of three years from the time they are granted asylum or temporary residence. Studies addressing this policy have found controversial effects on labor market integration. However, the gender effects of this regulation have been under researched so far. Therefore, this paper aims to fill this gap by exploring the relationship between the likelihood of refugees' employment and the Residential Obligation Act enacted by the German government through a gender lens. In addition, we aim to understand the impact of macro-conditions on the labor force integration of refugee women. Based on data from the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Refugee Survey from 2016 to 2020, we use logit models to identify the probability of being employed at paid work. We find that the Residential Obligation Act has no impact for female refugees, while it is negative for males. In this regard, our findings show that the act has not achieved its integration goal in terms of paid employment, and macro-conditions of the regional labor markets, i.e. unemployment rates, have a significant negative impact on refugees’ access to paid work.