Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Long-term absenteeism and moral hazard - Evidence from a natural experiment

This paper shows that long-term sick employees are unlikely to be very responsive to moderate monetary labor supply incentives. The paper, theoretically and empirically, evaluates the labor supply effects of cuts in statutory sick pay levels on long-term absenteeism in Germany. Cutting sick pay did not significantly reduce the average incidence and duration of sick leave periods longer than six weeks. ...

Assessing the effectiveness of health care cost containment measures: evidence from the market for rehabilitation care

This study empirically evaluates the effectiveness of different health care cost containment measures. The measures investigated were introduced in Germany in 1997 to reduce moral hazard and public health expenditures in the market for rehabilitation care. Of the analyzed measures, doubling the daily copayments was clearly the most effective cost containment measure, resulting in a reduction in utilization ...

Revisiting the Income-Health Nexus: The Importance of Choosing the "Right" Indicator

We show that the choice of the welfare measure has a substantial impact on the degree of welfare-related health inequality. Combining various income and wealth measures with different health measures, we calculate 80 health concentration indices. The influence of the welfare measure is more pronounced when using subjective health measures than when using objective health measures.

In Vino Pecunia? The Association Between Beverage-Specific Drinking Behavior and Wages

A Natural Experiment on Sick Pay Cuts, Sickness Absence, and Labor Costs

This study estimates the reform effects of a reduction in statutory sick pay levels on various outcome dimensions. A federal law reduced the legal obligation of German employers to provide 100 percent continued wages for up to six weeks per sickness episode to 80 percent. This measure increased the ratio of employees having no days of absence by about 7.5 percent. The mean number of absence days per ...

The Effects of Expanding the Generosity of the Statutory Sickness Insurance System

This article evaluates an expansion of employer-mandated sick leave from 80% to 100% of forgone gross wages in Germany. We employ and compare parametric difference-in-difference (DID), matching DID and mixed approaches. Overall workplace absences increased by at least 10% or 1 day per worker per year. We show that taking partial compliance into account increases coefficient estimates. Further, heterogeneity ...

The Short-Term Population Health Effects of Weather and Pollution: Implications of Climate Change

This study comprehensively assesses the immediate effects of extreme weather conditions and high concentrations of ambient air pollution on population health. For Germany and the years 1999 to 2008, we link the universe of all 170 million hospital admissions, along with all 8 million deaths, with weather and pollution data reported at the day-county level. Extreme heat significantly increases hospitalizations ...

Top-down vs. Bottom-up: The Long-Term Impact of Government Ideology and Personal Experience on Values

This paper studies the long-term impact of societal socialization on values using the example of doping behavior in sports. We apply the German Reunification Approach to the microcosm of Berlin and exploit its 40-year long division into a capitalist and a communist sector. We deliberately chose attitudes toward doping to test the impact of ideology on values since (i) post-1989 disappointed economic ...

Persistent Educational Advantage Across Three Generations: Empirical Evidence for Germany

This article uses survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) to analyze the persistence of educational attainment across three generations in Germany. I obtain evidence of a robust effect of grandparents’ education on respondents’ own educational attainment in West Germany, net of parental class, education, occupational status, family income, parents’ relationship history, and family ...

The Gap between the Rich and the Poor Keeps Growing: Seven Questions for Markus M. Grabka