Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

A Family Affair: Job Loss and the Mental Health of Spouses and Adolescents

This study examines the impact of involuntary job loss on the mental health of family members. Estimates from fixed-effects panel data models, using panel data for Australia, provide little evidence of any negative spillover effect on the mental health of husbands as a result of their wives’ job loss. The mental well-being of wives, however, declines following their husbands’ job loss, but only if ...

Language Skills and Employment Rate of Refugees in Germany Improving with Time

Asylum seekers migrating to Germany remains a hotly debated topic. The second wave of a longitudinal survey of refugees shows that their integration has progressed significantly, even though some refugees came to Germany in poor health and with little formal education. Compared to the previous year, refugees’ German skills have improved, as have their participation rates in the workforce, education, ...

Economic consequences of immigration in Europe

Occupational Recognition and Immigrant Labor Market Outcomes

In this paper, we analyze how the formal recognition of immigrants' foreign occupational qualifications afects their subsequent labor market outcomes. The empirical analysis is based on a novel German data set that links respondents' survey information to their administrative records, allowing us to observe immigrants at monthly intervals before, during and after their application for occupational ...

Migration and Imperfect Labor Markets: Theory and Cross-Country Evidence from Denmark, Germany and the UK

We investigate the labor market effects of immigration in Denmark, Germany and the UK, three countries which are characterized by considerable differences in labor market institutions and welfare states. Institutions such as collective bargaining, minimum wages, employment protection and unemployment benefits affect the way in which wages respond to labor supply shocks, and, hence, the labor market ...

Migration and Wage Setting: Reassessing the Labor Effects of Migration

This paper employs a wage-setting approach to analyze the labor market effects of immigration into Germany. The wage-setting framework relies on the assumption that wages tend to decline with the unemployment rate, albeit imperfectly. This enables us to consider labor market rigidities, which are particularly relevant in Europe. We find that the elasticity of the wage-setting curve is particularly ...

Forced Migration, Arrival in Germany, and First Steps toward Integration

A new representative survey of a total of 4,500 recently arrived refugees to Germany conducted by the Institute for Employment Research (IAB), the Research Centre of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF-FZ), and the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin) has generated an entirely new database for analyzing forced migration and the ...

Welfare receipt misreporting in survey data and its consequences for state dependence estimates: new insights from linked administrative and survey data

In many advanced welfare states, welfare recipients often receive benefits for long periods. This persistence of welfare receipt can be caused by two distinct mechanisms: genuine or spurious state dependence. Knowledge of which of the two mechanisms drives the observed state dependence is important because the policy implications are different. Most of the empirical evidence on state dependence relies ...

Income and Longevity Revisited: Do High-Earning Women Live Longer?

Feature Selection Methods for Optimal Design of Studies for Developmental Inquiry

Objectives: As diary, panel, and experience sampling methods become easier to implement, studies of development and aging are adopting more and more intensive study designs. However, if too many measures are included in such designs, interruptions for measurement may constitute a significant burden for participants. We propose the use of feature selection—a data-driven machine learning process—in study ...