Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Individual Heterogeneity, Job Matching, and Returns to Tenure in Germany

Data from the German Socio-Economic Panel are used to examine the roles of individual heterogeneity and job match quality in generating commonly observed wagetenure profiles. The evidence presented in the paper indicates that once those factors are reflected in the estimations, the returns to seniority are no longer measurable. Job match quality appears to be the dominant factor in the German labor ...

Intergenerational Correlations in Labor Market Status: A Comparison of the United States and Germany

Non-linear patterns of intergenerational mobility in Germany and the United States

Does Solo Self-Employment Serve as a 'Stepping Stone' to Employership?

This paper examines the extent to which solo self-employment serves as a vehicle for job creation. Using panel data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, a dynamic multinomial logit model of transitions between labour market states is estimated. The empirical strategy closely follows that used in a previous study employing household data from Germany by Lechmann ...

Worlds of Working Poverty. Cross-National Variation in the Mechanisms that Lead Poverty among Workers

The objective of this paper is to distinguish between different types of working poverty, on the basis of the mechanisms that produce it. Whereas the poverty literature identifies a myriad of risk factors and of categories of disadvantaged workers, we focus on three immediate causes of working poverty, namely low wage rate, weak labour force attachment, and high needs, the latter mainly due to the ...

Sharing the Wealth - An Empirical Analysis in Income Shocks and Intra-Family Transfers in Germany

Income Shocks, Intergenerational Transfers, and Human Capital in Germany

This paper uses the GSOEP to analyze the impact of German reunification on financial transfers from parents to their adult children. A difference-in-differences approach is applied to estimate probability and amount of transfers. The analysis indicates that, across time, Easterners are less likely to make transfers than Westerners. Over time, the propensity to give to all children has decreased in ...

The “Bomb” Risk Elicitation Task

This paper presents the Bomb Risk Elicitation Task (BRET), an intuitive procedure aimed at measuring risk attitudes. Subjects decide how many boxes to collect out of 100, one of which contains a bomb. Earnings increase linearly with the number of boxes accumulated but are zero if the bomb is also collected. The BRET requires minimal numeracy skills, avoids truncation of the data, allows the precise ...

A Theoretical and Experimental Appraisal of Five Risk Elicitation Methods

The paper performs an in-depth comparison of four incentivised risk elicitation tasks. We show by means of a simulation exercise that part of the often observed heterogeneity of estimates across tasks is due to task-specific measurement error induced by the mere mechanics of the tasks. We run a replication experiment in a homogeneous subject pool using a between subjects one-shot design. Results shows ...

Safe Options Induce Gender Differences in Risk Attitudes

Gender differences in risk attitudes are frequently observed, although recent literature has shown that they are context dependent rather than ubiquitous. In this paper we try to rationalize the heterogeneity of results investigating experimentally whether the presence of a safe option among the set of alternatives explains why females are more risk averse than males. We manipulate three widely used ...