Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

The Vast Majority of Employees in Germany Are Satisfied with Their Jobs

The vast majority of workers rate their professional occupations positively; only one in eight is unhappy with his or her job. This has been the case for the past 20 years. There is little difference in the degree of satisfaction between genders, workers in West Germany and East Germany, or among different age groups. Even the level of compensation and the nature of the work itself do not exert any ...

Home Offices: Plenty of Untapped Potential

As far as the share of individuals with a home office is concerned, Germany is below the EU average and lags considerably behind other countries such as France, the UK, or the Scandinavian countries. Only 12 percent of all employees in Germany work primarily or occasionally from home, although this would theoretically be possible in 40 percent of jobs. In most cases, an employee’s desire to work from ...

Hourly Wages in Lower Deciles No Longer Lagging behind When It Comes to Wage Growth

For many years, only better-paid workers benefited from Germany’s real wage increases. In contrast, dependent employees with lower hourly wages suffered substantial losses, while the low-wage sector expanded. Around 2010, these trends came to an end. Now all wage groups benefit from wage increases—even if those in the middle of the distribution lag somewhat behind. At the very least, this new pattern ...

The Soccer World Cup in Germany: A Major Sporting and Cultural Event - But Without Notable Business Cycle Effects

Demographic Change Necessitates Educational Reform and Lifelong Learning

Effects of Job Entry Restrictions on Economic Integration. Evidence for Recent Ethnic German Immigrants

Parental impact on attitude formation: A siblings study on worries about immigration

The existing literature on attitudes towards immigration has not accounted for the potential effect of unobservable home education on attitude formation. Yet, factors such as parents’ knowledge, their morals, and their weltanschauung are likely to influence the attitudes of the next generation.Their omission from the analysis thus threatens to lead to erroneous conclusions. Utilizing siblings data ...

Life-cycle variations in the association between current and lifetime earnings: Evidence for German natives and guest workers

In many economic models a central variable of interest is lifetime or permanent income which is not observed in survey data sets and typically proxied by annual income information. To assess the quality of such approximations, we use a unique source of lifetime earnings — the German pension system — and focus on two important issues that have been largely ignored in the existing literature. The first ...

Management Quality, Firm Size, and Managerial Compensation: A Comparison between Germany and the UK

Sport for all in aging societies - Findings from Germany