Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

The Child Penalty. A Compensating Wage Differential?

Objective Trends and Perceptions of Health Status in Germany

The Willingness to Pay for Job Amenities: Evidence from Mother's Return to Work

How can we encourage unused work potentials, such as young mothers, to participate in the labor market? This study addresses this issue by providing a direct measure for the relevance of job-related amenities for mothers work decision. It is the first study to directly estimate mothers’ marginal willingness to pay (MWP) for job amenities. Its identification strategy relies on German maternity leave ...

Who turned their back on the SPD? - Electoral disaffection with the German Social Democratic Party and the Hartz reforms

This paper proposes an empirical analysis of the declining support for the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) during Schröder government’s second term of office, which was marked by major reforms in the fields of unemployment insurance and labour market policy (Hartz reforms). Drawing on a panel of West Germans, we provide evidence that this disaffection was strongly related to a worker’s occupation ...

Maternity Leave and its Consequences for Subsequent Careers in Germany

Subject of this paper is the investigation of wage developments of women interrupting their careers for giving birth to children in comparison to men's wages not facing a parental interruption. We estimate OLS regression models for different subcategories defined by age and point in time. We use data from the German Socioeconomic Panel from 1984 to 2011 to show the importance of legal job protection ...

Young and Out in Germany (On Youths? Chances of Labor Market Entrance in Germany)

Wages in the East German Transition Process - Facts and Explanations

We analyze wage developments in the East German transition process both at the macro and at the microeconomic level. At the macroeconomic level, we draw special attention to the important distinction between product and consumption wages, describe the development of various wage measures, labor productivity and unit labor costs in East Germany in relation to West Germany, and relate these developments ...

A Behaviouristic Approach for Measuring Poverty: The Decomposition Approach – Empirical Illustrations for Germany 1995-2009

In this paper an alternative approach with regard to poverty measurement is discussed: the so-called decomposition approach. This method differentiates between various social groups in the sense that for each group a separate poverty line is determined. E. g., household size might be a criterion for such a social differentiation. By doing this, the problem of traditional poverty measurement to refer ...

A New Framework of Measuring Inequality: Variable Equivalence Scales and Group-Specific Well-Being Limits – Sensitivity Findings for German Personal Income Distribution 1995-2009

The discussion paper examines sensitivity influences on the German personal income distribution in a time-series perspective and in a methodically broad manner. The author spins on the following “adjusting screws” of distributional analyses: (1) different kinds of equivalence scales, (2) different demarcations of income areas (in the sense of social classes), (3) different inequality indicators, and ...

Impacts of an Ageing Society on Macroeconomics and Income Inequality – The Case of Germany since the 1980s

The discussion paper is concerned with the interplay between demography and macroeconomics on one hand and macroeconomics and income inequality on the other hand. For this purpose, several estimation equations are derived by econometric methods (on the empirical basis of the 1984-2010 German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) waves). In concrete terms, the macroeconomic variables inflation, economic growth, ...