Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Do Poor Children Become Poor Adults? Lessons from a Cross Country Comparison of Generational Earnings Mobility

A Portrait of Child Poverty in Germany

This paper offers a descriptive portrait of income poverty among children in Germany between the early 1980s and 2001, with a focus on developments since unification in 1991. Data from the German Socio-Economic Panel are used to estimate poverty rates, rates of entry to and exit from poverty, and the duration of time spent in and out of poverty. The analysis focuses upon comparisons between East andWest ...

The Impact of Tax and Transfer Systems on Children in the European Union

Parental time dedication and children’s education. An analysis of West Germany

Parental time dedication in childhood, at least of certain kinds, has been observed to be positive for children’s cognitive and emotional development. We examine two underexplored issues: a) the effect of time inputs in early childhood on later educational achievement (at age 17) and b) effect differences by parents’ level of education. We use data from the German Socioeconomic Panel and analyze a ...

The Interaction of Job Satisfaction, Job Search, and Job Changes. An Empirical Investigation with German Panel Data

Using the rich data set of the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) this article analyzes the effects of job characteristics on job satisfaction as well as the conditions under which low job satisfaction leads to job search, and under which job search leads to job changes. Individual fixed effects are included into the analysis in order to hold unobserved heterogeneity constant. According to the empirical ...

Performance Pay, Risk Attitudes and Job Satisfaction

We present a model in which workers with greater ability and greater risk tolerance move into performance pay jobs to capture rents and contrast it with the classic agency model. Estimates from the German Socio-Economic Panel confirm testable implications drawn from our model. First, before controlling for earnings, workers in performance pay jobs have higher job satisfaction, a proxy for on-the-job ...

Reciprocity and Profit Sharing: Is There an Inverse U-shaped Relationship?

Free-riding potentially limits the effectiveness of profit sharing in motivating workers. While reciprocity can mitigate this problem, it need not be uniformly productive. We show that the probability of receiving profit sharing takes an inverse U-shape as detailed individual survey measures of reciprocity increase. This is consistent with moderate but not extreme reciprocity stimulating productivity. ...

Perceived unfairness in CEO compensation and work morale

CEO compensation that is perceived to be excessive regularly causes agitation in the population. Using German data, we show that perceiving CEO pay to be unfair has economic repercussions in terms of lower work morale.

Fairness spillovers - The case of taxation

It is standardly assumed that individuals react to perceived unfairness or norm violations in precisely the same area or relationship where the original offense has occurred. However, grievances over being exposed to injustice may have even broader consequences and also spill over to other contexts, causing non-compliant behavior there. We present evidence that such “fairness spillovers” can incur ...

Downward wage rigidity and job mobility

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) we study whether being individually affected by downward wage rigidity has an effect on layoffs, quits and intra-firm mobility. Within a structural empirical model we estimate the individual extent of wage rigidity. This is expressed by the wage sweep-up, which measures by how much individual wage growth increases through the effect of downward ...