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SOEPpapers 354 / 2011
In this paper, we focus on network- and gender-specific determinants of remittances, which are often explained theoretically by way of intra-family contracts. We develop a basic formal concept that includes aspects of the transnational network and derive hypotheses from it. For our empirical investigation, we use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) for the years 2001-2006. Our findings ...
2011| Elke Holst, Andrea Schäfer, Mechthild Schrooten
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SOEPpapers 353 / 2011
In the modern welfare state, people who cannot make a living usually receive financial assistance from public funds. Accordingly, the so-called social work norm against living off other people is violated, which may be the reason why the unemployed are so unhappy. If so, however, labour market concepts based on the notion of promoting low-paid jobs that are subsidised if necessary with additional payments ...
2011| Adrian Chadi
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SOEPpapers 352 / 2011
Using SOEP panel data and difference-in-differences methods, this study is the first to empirically evaluate the effectiveness of four different health care cost containment measures within an integrated framework. The four measures investigated were introduced in Germany in 1997 to reduce moral hazard and public health expenditures in the market for convalescent care. Doubling the daily copayments ...
2011| Nicolas R. Ziebarth
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SOEPpapers 351 / 2011
Recently, building on the highly polarizing Stiglitz report, a growing literature suggests that statistical offices and applied researchers explore other aspects of human welfare apart from material well-being, such as job security, crime, health, environmental factors and subjective perceptions. To explore the additional information of these indicators, we analyze data on the macro level from the ...
2011| Sonja C. Kassenböhmer, Christoph M. Schmidt
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SOEPpapers 350 / 2010
We analyze the effect of household indebtedness on different health outcomes using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 1999-2009. To establish a causal effect, we rely on (a) fixed-effects methods, (b) a subsample of constantly employed individuals, and (c) lagged debt variables to rule out problems of reverse causality. We apply different measures of household indebtedness, such as the ...
2010| Matthias Keese, Hendrik Schmitz
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SOEPpapers 349 / 2010
We use life satisfaction and Body Mass Index (BMI) information from three waves of the SOEP to test for social interactions in BMI between spouses. Social interactions require that the cross-partial effect of partner's weight and own weight in the utility function be positive. Using life satisfaction as a utility proxy, semi-parametric regressions show that the correlation between satisfaction and ...
2010| Andrew E. Clark, Fabrice Etilé
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SOEPpapers 348 / 2010
Experimental evidence reveals that there is a strong willingness to trust and to act in both positively and negatively reciprocal ways. So far it is rarely analyzed whether these variables of social cognition influence everyday decision making behavior. We focus on entrepreneurs who are permanently facing exchange processes in the interplay with investors, sellers, and buyers, as well as needing to ...
2010| Marco Caliendo, Frank M. Fossen, Alexander S. Kritikos
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SOEPpapers 347 / 2010
In household panels, typically all household members are surveyed. Because household composition changes over time, so-called following rules are implemented to decide whether to continue surveying household members who leave the household (e.g. former spouses/partners, grown children) in subsequent waves. Following rules have been largely ignored in the literature leaving panel designers unaware of ...
2010| Matthias Schonlau, Nicole Watson, Martin Kroh
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SOEPpapers 346 / 2010
I argue that the empirical strategies for estimation of the intergenerational elasticity of lifetime earnings that are currently employed in the literature might not eliminate bias arising from life-cycle effects. Specifically, I demonstrate that procedures based on the generalized errors-in-variables model suggested by Haider and Solon (2006) or the consideration of differential earnings growth rates ...
2010| Jan Leonard Stuhler
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SOEPpapers 345 / 2010
What are the long-term effects of Communism on economically relevant notions such as social trust? To answer this question, we use the reunification of Germany as a natural experiment and study the post-reunification trajectory of convergence with regard to individuals' trust and risk, as well as perceived fairness and cooperativeness. Our hypotheses are derived from a model of German reunification ...
2010| Guido Heineck, Bernd Süssmuth
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SOEPpapers 344 / 2010
It is well known that individuals' risk attitudes are related to behavioral outcomes such as smoking, portfolio decisions, and also educational attainment, but there is barely any evidence on whether parental risk attitudes affect the educational attainment of dependent children. We add to this literature and examine children's secondary school track choice in Germany where tracking occurs at age ten ...
2010| Guido Heineck, Oliver Wölfel
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SOEPpapers 343 / 2010
We investigate the effect of broad personality traits - the Big Five - on an individual's decision to become self-employed. In particular, we test an overall indicator of the entrepreneurial personality. Since we find that the level of selfemployment varies considerably across professions, we also perform the analysis for different types of professions, namely, those classified as being in the "creative ...
2010| Michael Fritsch, Alina Rusakova
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SOEPpapers 342 / 2010
Das steigende mittlere Alter bei Geburt wird in der medizinischen Forschung als wichtiger Risikofaktor für die Gesundheit der Neugeborenen erachtet, die über den Indikator Frühgeburt bestimmt werden kann. Die vorliegende Analyse eines Kollektivs von insgesamt 1391 Geburten von Müttern im SOEP, konnte in einem multivariaten Design zeigen, dass der Einfluss des biologischen Alters tatsächlich stark von ...
2010| Frederik Peters
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SOEPpapers 341 / 2010
In 2001, the voluntary additional Riester pension scheme was implemented in Germany. Financial subsidies should incentivize people to increase their private pension savings. In this paper, we hypothesize that these publicly subsidized savings mainly replace existing not subsidized savings and that supplier induced demand is an important factor. Using data from the Socio-economic Panel we analyze the ...
2010| Christian Pfarr, Udo Schneider
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SOEPpapers 340 / 2010
The aim of this paper is to apply recently proposed individual welfare measures in the context of random utility models of labour supply. Contrary to the standard practice of using reference preferences and wages, these measures preserve preference heterogeneity in the normative step of the analysis. They also make the ethical priors, implicit in any interpersonal comparison, more explicit. On the ...
2010| André Decoster, Peter Haan
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SOEPpapers 339 / 2010
According to the life-cycle theory of consumption and saving, foreseeable retirement events should not reduce consumption. Whereas some consumption expenditures may fall when goods are self-produced (given higher leisure after retirement), this argument applies especially to housing consumption which can hardly be substituted by home production. We test this hypothesis using micro data for Germany ...
2010| Miriam Beblo, Sven Schreiber
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SOEPpapers 338 / 2010
This paper establishes that individuals with an internal locus of control, i.e., who believe that reinforcement in life comes from their own actions instead of being determined by luck or destiny, earn higher wages. However, this positive effect only translates into labor income via the channel of education. Factor structure models are implemented on an augmented data set coming from two different ...
2010| Rémi Piatek, Pia Pinger
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SOEPpapers 337 / 2010
We examine whether low-paid jobs have an effect on the occupational advancement probability of unemployed persons to obtain better-paid jobs in the future (stepping-stone effect). We make use of data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and apply a dynamic random-effects probit model. Our results suggest that low-wage jobs can act as stepping stones to better-paid work. The improvement of the ...
2010| Andreas Knabe, Alexander Plum
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SOEPpapers 336 / 2010
This paper explores whether more generous social spending polices in fact lead to less income inequality, or if redistributive outcomes are offset by behavioral disincentive effects. To account for the inherent endogeneity of social policies with regard to inequality levels, I apply the System GMM estimator and use the presumably random incidence of certain diseases as instruments for social spending ...
2010| Judith Niehues
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SOEPpapers 335 / 2010
Posner (1995) proposes the redistribution of health spending from old women to old men to equalize life expectancy. His argument is based on the assumption that the woman's utility is higher if her husband is alive. Using self-reported satisfaction measures from a long-running German panel survey, the Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), the present study conducts an empirical test of this assumption. ...
2010| Johannes Schwarze, Christoph Wunder