Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Substantial Labor Market Effects of the Residency Status: How Important are Initial Conditions At Arrival for Immigrants?

This paper uses information on the legal status upon arrival to study long-term labor market effects, whereas selection and potential outmigration are taken into account by a large set of methods. I find that immigrants arrived with a job commitment in Germany achieve a longterm income advantage of 18.6% relative to other migrant groups, while language skills and ethnic networks can be excluded as ...

The Impact of Language Skills on Immigrants’ Labor Market Integration: A Brief Revision With a New Approach

I examine the impact of language skills on immigrants’ labor market performance by applying a new approach, which allows to estimate wage benefits attributed to initial language skills at arrival. By exploiting unique data, I isolate the endogenous part of current German skills and instrument current command by German proficiency measured retrospectively at the point in time of migration. This approach ...

Delegation in Long-Term Relationships

This paper considers the effects of a two-period interaction on the decision of a principal to delegate authority to a potentially biased but better informed agent. Compared to the (repeated) one-period case, the agent's first period actions may also signal his type which in turn impacts wages in Period 2. As a result, biased agents have an incentive not to follow their own preferences in Period ...

Seasonal variation in sports participation

This study explores indicators describing socio-demographics, sports participation characteristics and motives which are associated with variation in sports participation across seasons. Data were drawn from the German Socio-Economic Panel which contains detailed information on the sports behaviour of adults in Germany. Overall, two different measures of seasonal variation are developed and used as ...

Sports Participation and Social Capital Formation During Adolescence

Objective National and international policies claim that young people's sports participation improves their social capital. This article is the first to examine if sports participation has a causal effect on social capital formation during adolescence and whether such effects depend on the organizational format or the type of sports practiced. Methods Propensity score matching is employed in the ...

Income Distribution and Social Expenditures: A Cross-National Perspective

Unmet Aspirations as an Explanation for the Age U-shape in Human Wellbeing

A large literature in behavioral and social sciences has found that human wellbeing follows a U-shape over age. Some theories have assumed that the U-shape is caused by unmet expectations that are felt painfully in midlife but beneficially abandoned and experienced with less regret during old age. In a unique panel of 132,609 life satisfaction expectations matched to subsequent realizations, I find ...

Simulating German Income and Social Security Tax Payments Using the GSOEP

How Income Inequality changed in Germany following Reunification: An empirical Analysis using Decomposable Inequality Measures

Trends in the Income Distribution of Unified Germany Analyzed by Decomposable Inequality Measures