Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Temporary Employment: Chance or Risk?

Labour Market Mobility: Destabilization and Destandardization: For Whom? The Development of West German Job Mobility since 1984

We use the Socio-Economic Panel to study how the job-shift patterns of West German workers changed between 1984 and 2008, analyzing trends separately by gender, education, labor force experience, firm size, and sector. We document a considerable reduction in the rate of within-firm job changes, especially for men in large companies and with limited labor force experience, which we interpret as evidence ...

Getting more unequal: Rising labor market inequalities among low-skilled men in West Germany

During recent decades, earnings differentials between educational groups have risen in most advanced economies. While these trends are well-documented, much less is known about inequality trends within educational groups. To address this issue, we study changes in labor market inequalities among low-skilled men in West Germany. Using data from the German Socio-economic Panel, we show that both risks ...

The Changing Wage Distribution in Germany between 1985 and 2006

In this paper the changes in the wage distribution in (West-)Germany between 1985 and 2006 are analysed. The theoretical framework is based on the literature on skill-biased technological change (SBTC) and on structural theory. Analyses draw on descriptive measures of the development of wage inequality among blue- and white-collar workers as well as on regression analyses of individual and structural ...

Actuarial Adjustments, Retirement Behaviour and Worker Heterogeneity

The behavioural response with respect to actuarial adjustments in the German public pension system is analysed. The introduction of actuarial adjustments serves as a source of exogenous variation to estimate discrete time transition rates into retirement. The analysis is conducted on administrative data from social security records and on survey data in a comparative scenario. Probability mass points ...

The Effect of Benefit Reductions on the Retirement Age: The Heterogeneous Response of Manual and Non‐Manual Workers

I estimate the effect of benefit reductions on the timing of retirement. The introduction of actuarial adjustments in the German public pension system serves as a source of exogenous variation to estimate discrete time transition rates into retirement for individuals of age 60–66. Responses to benefit reductions are elaborated separately for manual and non-manual workers. On average, individuals postpone ...

Bridge Unemployment in Germany: Response in Labour Supply to an Increased Early Retirement Age

This study examines an increase in the early retirement age from 60 to 63 for the group of older unemployed men in Germany. As consequence of this policy reform, the time to retirement is increased from the perspective of recently unemployed individuals and therefore serves as a source of exogenous variation. We estimate continuous time hazard models for individuals at risk of leaving the state unemployment ...

Constructing indices of multivariate polarization

Multivariate indices of polarization are constructed to measure effects of non-income attributes like wealth and education. Polarization is considered as the presence of groups which are internally homogeneous, externally heterogeneous, and of similar size. We propose a class of polarization indices which is built from measures of relative groups size and from decomposable indices of socio-economic ...

A Polarization Index for OVERLAPPING Groups

The well‐known index of income bipolarization proposed by Wolfson (1994) requires two groups to be split according to the median income and, therefore, to be non‐overlapping. The aim of this paper is to propose a new polarization index in the spirit of the Wolfson index. It allows for any possible partition of the population in two or more (also overlapping) groups. The new index maintains the simplicity ...

The Distribution of Income and Wages in the UK and West Germany, 1984-92

The first half of the report sheds some new light on the following questions with a detailed and consistent comparison of income distributions in Western Germany and the UK from 1984 to 1992. To what extent was the income distribution in Western Germany similar to the UK in 1984? Did the inequality of West German incomes rise to the same extent? What was the differing role of the labour market, the ...