This is the first study investigating the causal effect of maternal education on child's health and schooling outcomes in Germany. We apply an instrumental variables approach that has not yet been used in the intergenerational context. For that purpose, we draw on a rich German panel data set (SOEP) containing information about three generations. This allows instrumenting maternal education by the ...
The present paper aims to quantify the growth and welfare consequences of changing family structures in western societies. For this reason we develop a dynamic general equilibrium model with both genders which takes into account changes of the marital status as a stochastic process. Individuals respond to these shocks by adjusting savings and labor supply. Our quantitative results indicate that the ...
Although there are a variety of studies on the gender pay gap, only a few relate to managerial positions. The present study attempts to fill this gap. Managers in private companies in Germany are a highly selective group of women and men, who differ only marginally in their human capital endowments. The Oaxaca/Blinder decomposition shows that the gender pay gap in the gross monthly salary can hardly ...
Do EU citizens have an increased opportunity to improve their position in the distribution of earnings over time? This question is answered by exploring short and long-term wage mobility for males across 14 EU countries between 1994 and 2001 using ECHP. Mobility is evaluated using rank measures which capture positional movements in the distribution of earnings. All countries recording an increase in ...
Do other peoples' incomes reduce the happiness which people in advanced countries experience from any given income? And does this help to explain why in the U.S., Germany and some other advanced countries, happiness has been constant for many decades? The answer to both questions is "Yes". We provide 4 main pieces of evidence. 1) In the U.S. General Survey (repeated samples since 1972) comparator income ...
Previous estimates of unfair inequality of opportunity (IOp) are only lower bounds because of the unobservability of the full set of endowed circumstances beyond the sphere of individual responsibility. In this paper, we suggest a new estimator based on a fixed effects panel model which additionally allows identifying an upper bound. We illustrate our approach by comparing Germany and the US based ...
This paper is the first to analyze intergenerational economic mobility based on sibling correlations in permanent earnings in Germany and to provide a cross-country comparison of Germany, Denmark, and the US. The main findings are as follows: the importance of family and community background in Germany is higher than in Denmark and comparable to that in the US. This holds true for brothers and sisters. ...
Youth is one of the phases in the life-cycle when some of the most decisive life transitions take place. Entering the labour market or leaving parental home are events with important consequences for the economic well-being of young adults. In this paper, the interrelationship between employment, residential emancipation and poverty dynamics is studied for eight European countries by means of an econometric ...
Empirical analyses on the determinants of life satisfaction often include the impact of the number of children variable among controls without fully discriminating between its two (socio-relational and pecuniary) components. In our empirical analysis on the German Socioeconomic Panel we show that, when introducing household income without correction for the number of members, the pecuniary effect prevails ...
In this study we assess the relationship between father and son earnings among (West) German Workers. To reduce the lifecycle and attenuation bias a novel sampling procedure is developed and applied to the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) 1984-2006. Our preferred point estimate indicates an intergenerational earnings elasticity of 1/3 .