Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Income-related inequalities in health: some international comparisons

This paper presents evidence on income-related inequalities in self-assessed health in nine industrialized countries. Health interview survey data were used to construct concentration curves of self-assessed health, measured as a latent variable. Inequalities in health favoured the higher income groups and were statistically significant in all countries. Inequalities were particularly high in the United ...

Population- and Individual-Level Changes in Life Satisfaction Surrounding Major Life Stressors

How do stressful life events impact well-being, and how does their impact differ from person to person? In contrast to work focusing on discrete classes of responding, the current study examines the adequacy of a model where responses to stressors are characterized by a population average and continuous variability around that average. Using decades of yearly data from a large German longitudinal study ...

Old-age Security of Women in the Twelve EC-Countries - To what Extent Are Beveridge's Two Main Principles of Universality and Guaranteed Minimum Income Fulfilled?

Estimating Models of Earnings Dynamics with the European Community Household Panel Data

The aim of this paper is to use panel data on male workers to separate the permanent from the transitory component of earnings inequality for a number of European countries. Several authors have noted the need for long panel data sets when conducting such exercises. Unfortunately the data best suited to international comparisons across European countries (the European Community Household Panel) is ...

Social Ties for Labor Market Access - Lessons from the Migration of East German Inventors

We study the impact of social ties on the migration of inventors from East to West Germany, using the fall of the Iron Curtain and German reunification as a natural experiment. We identify East German inventors via their patenting track records prior to 1990 and their social security records in the German labor market after reunification. Modeling inventor migration to West German regions after 1990, ...

Essays on Skills, Health and Human Inequality (Dissertation)

Effort-reward imbalance at work and incident coronary heart disease: a multi-cohort study of 90,164 individuals

Background: Epidemiologic evidence for work stress as a risk factor for coronary heart disease is mostly based on a single measure of stressful work known as job strain, a combination of high demands and low job control. We examined whether a complementary stress measure that assesses an imbalance between efforts spent at work and rewards received predicted coronary heart disease. Methods: This multi-cohort ...

Do Employment Protection Reforms Affect Well-Being?

This paper examines reforms in German employment protection for permanent workers (EPLP) on workers' well-being proxied by life satisfaction. Using variation in how the reforms affected firms of different sizes, I apply a difference-in-differences approach in conjunction with individual fixed effects. I find that life satisfaction of temporary workers decreases by around 0.5 (11-point scale) when ...

Economic Development, Novelty Consumption, and Body Weight: Evidence from the East German Transition to Capitalism

Non-separable intertemporal preferences and “novelty consumption” can explain the persistent correlation between economic development and obesity. Employing the German reunification as a fast motion natural experiment of economic development, we study how the sudden availability of novel food products impacts individual consumption patterns and body weight. Immediately after the reunification, East ...

Three Essays on Labor Supply - Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades eines Doktors der Wirtschaftswissenschaft