Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Are Immigrants More Mobile Than Natives? Evidence from Germany

What Determines Household Saving Behavior? An Examination of Saving Motives and Saving Decisions

Saving decisions are complex, since there are many concurrent motives for saving a portion of one's income. However, while the existing literature covers all of these motives, most contributions select only one of them as a focus and relegate the others to the background by making simplifying assumptions about them. While the focus on only one saving motive is vital for many insights on aggregate ...

Discrete Heterogeneity in the Impact of Health Shocks on Labour Market Outcomes

Labour Market Outcomes of Second Generation Immigrants: How Heterogeneous Are They Really?

Bouncing Back from Health Shocks: Locus of Control, Labor Supply, and Mortality

Policy-makers worldwide are embarking on school programmes aimed at boosting students’ resilience. One facet of resilience is a belief about cause and effect in life, locus of control. I test whether positive control beliefs work as a psychological buffer against health shocks in adulthood. To identify behavioural differences in labour supply, I focus on a selected group of full-time employed men of ...

Lifecycle patterns in the socioeconomic gradient of risk preferences

We investigate which socioeconomic groups are most likely to change their risk preferences over the lifecourse using data from a nationally representative German survey and methods to separate age from cohort and period effects. Tolerance to risk drops by 0.5 SD across all socioeconomic groups from late adolescence up to age 45. From age 45 socioeconomic gradients emerge – risk tolerance continues ...

Between Life Cycle Model, Labor Market Integration and Discrimination: An Econometric Analysis of the Determinants of Return Migration

This paper studies the determinants of return migration by applying the Cox hazard model to longitudinal micro data from 1996 to 2012, including immigrants of a wide range of nationalities. The empirical results reveal the validity of the life cycle model of Migration Economics and a strong return probability decreasing effect of labor market integration and societal integration. Modeling non-proportional ...

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 ...