Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Immigration and Attitudes Towards Day Care

We examine the relationship between preferences for the public funding of school children day care and the share of foreign pupils in German jurisdictions. To this end, we employ multilevel models to analyze individual-level data from the 1997 and 2002 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel and data on different jurisdiction-levels from official sources. In contrast to a number of recent studies ...

Do Couples Bargain over Fertility? Evidence Based on Child Preference Data

Empirical literature has found evidence in favor of household bargaining models. In contrast to earlier tests that are limited to assignable private goods, we use child preference data in order to extend the empirical evidence on household bargaining to public household goods. In the empirical analysis, we exploit the different theoretical predictions for couples with heterogeneous and homogeneous ...

Unconditional Child Benefits, Mothers’ Labor Supply, and Family Well-Being: Evidence from a Policy Reform

In many parts of the developed world, governments devote a significant share of public funds to unconditional family cash transfers in an attempt to promote the economic well-being of households. But how successful are such policies? Germany has one of the world’s most generous child benefit systems, which was subject to a major reform in the mid-1990s. This article exploits the reform using a difference-in-differences ...

Political Socialization in Flux? Linking Family Non-Intactness during Childhood to Adult Civic Engagement

Some sociologists argue that non-intact family structures during childhood have a negative effect on adult children's civic engagement, since they undermine, and in some cases prevent, the processes and activities through which parents shape their children's political attitudes and orientations. In this paper, we evaluate this hypothesis on the basis of longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic ...

Exposure to television and individual beliefs: Evidence from a natural experiment

Does the information provided by mass media have the power to persistently affect individual beliefs about the drivers of success in life? To answer this question empirically, this contribution exploits a natural experiment on the reception of West German television in the former German Democratic Republic. After identifying the impact of Western television on individual beliefs and attitudes in the ...

Globalization, income distribution and voter preferences: Transmission mechanisms and reform acceptance (Dissertation)

Demographic Change and Regional Labour Markets: The Case of Eastern Germany

Demographic change will be one of the most challenging issues for industrialized economies in the decades to come. In this paper, we focus on the impact of demographic change on labour markets. By setting up a stylized model of a regional labour market, we are able to analyze the interaction of labour demand and supply during demographic transitions. The simulation results for eastern Germany, a forerunner ...

Individual Determinants of Recalls

Non-Take-Up of Student Financial Aid: A Microsimulation for Germany

This paper estimates the percentage of students who do not take up their federal need-based student financial aid entitlements and sheds light on determinants of this behavior. Against the background that educational mobility in Germany is low although extensive student financial aid for needy students is available, it is crucial to know whether students assert their claims for student aid at all. ...

Social Mobility in the 20th Century: Class Mobility and Occupational Change in the United States and Germany

Based on a novel class scheme and a unique compilation of German and American data, this book reveals that intergenerational class mobility increased over most of the past century. While country differences in intergenerational mobility are surprisingly small, gender, regional, racial and ethnic differences were initially large but declined over time. At the end of the 20th century, however, mobility ...