Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

The Effect of Child Care on Family Structure: Theory and Evidence

This paper studies the effect of child care provision on family structure. We present a model of a marriage market with positive assortative matching, where in equilibrium the poorest women stay single. Couples have to decide on the number of children and spousal specialization in home production of public goods and child care. We then study how child care provision affects the equilibrium. Due to ...

Formal Child Care and Family Structure: Theory and Evidence

This article studies the effect of child care provision on family structure. We present a model of a marriage market with positive assortative matching, where in equilibrium, the poorest women stay single. Couples have to decide on the number of children and spousal specialization in home production of public goods and child care. We then study how child care provision affects the equilibrium. Due ...

Culture, Spatial Diffusion of Ideas and their Long-Lasting Imprints – Evidence from Froebel’s Kindergarten Movement

We document the spatial diffusion of Friedrich Froebel’s radical invention of kindergartens in 19th-century Germany. The first kindergarten was founded at Froebel’s birthplace. Early spatial diffusion can be explained by cultural proximity, measured by historical dialect similarity, to Froebel’s birthplace. This result is robust to the inclusion of higher order polynomials in geographic distance and ...

Why Are Educated and Risk-Loving Persons More Mobile Across Regions?

Why are better educated and more risk-friendly persons more mobile across regions? To answer this question, we use micro data on internal migrants from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) 2000-2006 and merge this information with a unique proxy for region-pair-specific cultural distances across German regions constructed from historical local dialect patterns. Our findings indicate that risk-loving ...

Surfing Alone? The Internet and Social Capital: Evidence from an Unforeseeable Technological Mistake

Does the Internet undermine social capital, such as real-world inter-personal relations and civic engagement? Merging unique telecommunication data with geo-coded German individual-level data, we investigate how broadband Internet affects social capital. A first identification strategy uses first-differencing to account for unobserved time-invariant individual heterogeneity. A second identification ...

Public Child Care and Mothers’ Labor Supply – Evidence from Two Quasi-Experiments

Public child care provision should reconcile work and family life. Yet, empirical evidence for the relevance of public child care for maternal employment is ambiguous. We exploit the introduction of a legal claim to a place in kindergarten in Germany, which was contingent on month-of-birth cut-off dates and resulted in a marked increase in kindergarten attendance of three year olds in the following ...

Health-Related Quality of Life Into Adulthood After Very Preterm Birth

BACKGROUND: This study investigated change of health-related quality of life (HRQL) in very preterm/very low birth weight (VP/VLBW; born at <32 weeks’ gestation and/or <1500 g birth weight) individuals from adolescence to adulthood. Are perceptions similar by different informants (self, parents) and is HRQL related to economic and social functioning? METHODS: In a prospective whole-population ...

Offshoring, tasks, and the skill-wage pattern

The paper investigates the relationship between offshoring, wages, and the occupational task profile using rich individual-level panel data. Our main results suggest that, when only considering within-industry changes in offshoring, we identify a moderate wage reduction due to offshoring for low-skilled workers, though wage effects in relation to the task profile of occupations are not estimated with ...

Are There Any Class Size Effects on Early Career Earnings in West Germany

Empirical Evaluation of Selected Labour Market and Education Policies (Dissertation)