Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Entry to Home-ownership in Germany: Some comparisons with the United States

Residential mobility in a constrained housing market: implications for ethnic populations in Germany

Do Immigrants Improve Their Housing Quality When They Move? Evidence from the German Socio-Economic Panel

Previous research using the German Socio-Economic Panel showed that immigrants moved slightly more frequently than native-born Germans. The research in this paper extends that work and examines the extent to which this increased mobility is translated into improved housing quality. Overall, we find that all sample households have improved their housing status over time, and that both the immigrant ...

Non-employment and the welfare state - UK and Germany compared

Summary Unemployment rates are insufficient indicators of the level of economic activity because they say little about the scale of non-employment in a given working-age population. Empirical research has started to recognize this and policy debates increasingly concentrate on working-age inactivity as a relevant gauge of the state of labour markets (OECD, 2003). However, the causes for transitions ...

Best Practices, or, How to Link Policy Inputs and Well-Being Outcomes: the Role of Policy Input Indicators

The Dynamics of Social Assistence Benefit Receipt in Britain

We analyze the dynamics of social assistance benefit (SA) receipt among working-age adults in Britain between 1991 and 2005. The decline in the annual SA receipt rate was driven by a decline in the SA entry rate, rather than by the SA exit rate (which actually declined too). We examine the determinants of these trends using a multivariate dynamic random effects probit model of SA entry and exit probabilities ...

What Have Two Decades of British Economic Reform Delivered?

Workplace Heterogeneity and the Rise of West German Wage Inequality

We study the role of establishment-specific wage premiums in generating recent increases in West German wage inequality. Models with additive fixed effects for workers and establishments are fit in four sub-intervals spanning the period from 1985 to 2009. We show that these models provide a good approximation to the wage structure and can explain nearly all of the dramatic rise in West German wage ...

Opening the Black Box of Primary Effects: Relative Risk Aversion and Maternal Time Investments in Preschool Children

Judging from the abundant and expanding literature on educational inequalities, the apparent consensus is that divergent educational outcomes of individuals can be explained by two main mechanisms: classspecific differences in children’s skills (primary effects) and educational choices, net of skills (secondary effects). Contrary to the widespread agreement that primary effects stem from differences ...

Measuring cultural capital: Sense of entitlement, concerted cultivation, leisure activities, gatekeeper bias and skills