Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

The economic returns of bonding and bridging social capital for immigrant men in Germany

Using longitudinal data, this paper analyses the effect of different forms of social capital on the likelihood of employment and the occupational status of first generation immigrant men in Germany. This allows me to examine to what extent social capital of the bonding and the bridging types yield different returns. The study considers how contacts with natives, co-ethnic ties and family-based social ...

Immigrant Performance in the Labour Market: Bonding and Bridging Social Capital (Dissertation)

This definitive study offers an in-depth analysis of the role of social capital in Western labor markets. To address the vital question of how migrants take advantage of social relations between indigenous people and their own ethnic group, Bram Lancee surveys the impact of various forms of social capital on the integration of immigrants into their new labor markets in Germany and the Netherlands, ...

Job search methods and immigrant earnings: A longitudinal analysis of the role of bridging social capital

This paper analyses how finding a new job affects the earnings of immigrants. I hypothesize that job changes are more successful for individuals who have access to bridging social capital. Using data from the German Socio-economic Panel (1996–2011), fixed-effects models show that finding a new job results in higher earnings only when immigrants have both native German friends and high levels of human ...

The German Socio-Economic Panel: How It All Began

Incidence and intensity of smoothed income poverty in European countries

The purpose of this paper is to obtain, by combining two longitudinal perspectives, a more detailed national picture of poverty in the member states of the European Union, using the first four waves (1994–7) of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). In addition to this detailed consideration is given to the time dimension, poverty incidence, poverty gap and poverty intensity. Overall, the ranking ...

The data quality concept of accuracy in the context of publicly shared data sets

Along with other data quality dimensions, the concept of accuracy is often used to describe the quality of a particular data set. However, its basic definition refers to the statistical properties of estimators, which can hardly be proved by means of just a single survey. This ambiguity can be resolved by assigning “accuracy” to survey processes that are known to affect these properties. In this contribution, ...

Continuing Vocational Training in Germany - A Comparative Study Using 3 German Data Sets

Using the life satisfaction approach to value daylight savings time transitions: Evidence from Britain and Germany

Daylight savings time represents a public good with costs and benefits. We provide the first comprehensive examination of the welfare effects of the spring and autumn transitions for the UK and Germany. Using individual-level data and a regression discontinuity design, we estimate the effect of the transitions on life satisfaction. Our results show that individuals in both the UK and Germany experience ...

The effects of smoking bans on self-assessed health: evidence from Germany

We examine the effects of smoking bans on self-assessed health in Germany taking into account heterogeneities by smoking status, gender and age. We exploit regional variation in the dates of enactment and dates of enforcement across German federal states. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, our difference-in-differences estimates show that non-smokers' health improves, whereas smokers ...

Childbirth and the Long-Term Division of Labour within Couples: How do Substitution, Bargaining Power, and Norms affect Parents’ Time Allocation in West Germany?

Parents display a highly gendered division of labour: fathers specialize in paid work and mothers take over most domestic work. However, the processes underlying the long-term effect of parenthood on a couple’s time allocation remain obscure, because previous research merely looks at the average effect of having children, neglecting possible interactions with the partners’ absolute and relative resources. ...