Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Labor Taxation - A Hidden Privilege

Higher Tax Rates on Labor? Evidence from German Panel Data

This contribution investigates the justifiable spread between labor and capital income tax rates under a dual income tax, based on arguments put forth in Nielsen and Sørensen (1997). An efficient generalized instrumental variables estimator proposed by Hausman and Taylor (1981) is employed in a Mincer-type wage equation, which is estimated on recent data taken from the German Socio-Economic Panel. ...

How Do Germans React to the Commuting Allowance?

I research the consequences of changes in the deductibility of commuting costs in Germany from 2001 to 2006. Offícial figures provided by the Federal Statistical Office highlight the fact that German taxpayers claimed deductions for commuting allowances to the tune of 23-29 billion e over the years 2001-2004. Granting or not granting these deductions thus has wide ranging fiscal implications, a point ...

Three Essays on the Taxonometries of Labor Income (Dissertation)

Germany (Chapter 7)

Poverty Is a Public Bad: Panel Evidence from Subjective Well-Being Data

Previous research has found that subjective well-being (SWB) is lower for individuals classified as being in poverty. We extend the poverty-SWB literature by focusing on aggregate poverty. Using panel data for 39,239 individuals living in Germany from 2005–2013, we show that people's SWB is negatively correlated with the regional (state-level) poverty ratio while controlling for individual poverty ...

Income Comparison, Income Formation, and Subjective Well-Being: New Evidence on Envy versus Signaling

Drawing on the distinction between envy and signaling effects in income comparison, this paper uses panel data on subjective well-being from Germany over the period 1991–2009 to study whether the nature of income comparison has changed in the process of economic development and institutional change. We conceptualize a person's comparison income as the income predicted by indicators of her productivity ...

The Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) for Germany - Methods of Production and Management of Longitudinal Data

German wage curves, 1979-1990

Offshoring and Firm Performance: Self-Selection, Effects on Performance, or Both?

This paper uses unique new data for German manufacturing enterprises from matched regular surveys and a special purpose survey to investigate the causal effect of relocation of activities to a foreign country on various dimensions of firm performance. Enterprises that relocated activities abroad in the period 2001-03 for the first time are compared to firms that did not relocate activities abroad before ...