Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Egalitarianism and Competitiveness

Screening, Competition, and Job Design: Economic Origins of Good Jobs

High-performance work systems give workers more discretion, thereby increasing effort productivity but also shirking opportunities. We show experimentally that screening for work attitude and labor market competition are causal determinants of the viability of highperformance work systems, and we identify the complementarities between discretion, rent-sharing, and screening that render them profitable. ...

Health Effects on Children’s Willingness to Compete

The formation of human capital is important for a society’s welfare and economic success. Recent literature shows that child health can provide an important explanation for disparities in children’s human capital development across different socio-economic groups. While this literature focuses on cognitive skills as determinants of human capital, it neglects non-cognitive skills. We analyze data from ...

Predicting the Trend of Well-Being in Germany: How Much Do Comparisons, Adaption and Sociability Matter?

Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we estimate the variation of subjective well-being experienced by Germans over the last two decades testing the role of some of the major correlates of people’s well-being. Our results suggest that the variation of Germans’ well-being between 1996 and 2007 is well predicted by changes over time of income, demographics and social capital. ...

Educational Mismatch and Wages in Germany

Educational Mismatch and Wages: A Panel Analysis

A Comparative Analysis of the Nativity Wage Gap

This paper investigates the source of the gap in the relative wealth position of immigrant households residing in Australia, Germany and the United States. Our results indicate that in Germany and the United States wealth differentials are largely the result of disparity in the educational attainment and demographic composition of the native and immigrant populations, while income differentials are ...

Do Welfare Dependent Neighbors Matter for Individual Welfare Dependency?

This paper investigates neighborhood peer effects on individual welfare using a combined IV and control function approach. The empirical analysis is based on panel data for the years 2007-2010 constructed by enriching the geo-referenced version of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) with aggregated zip code level-information. The results suggest that individual welfare use is positively correlated ...

Analysing Welfare Reform in a Microsimulation-AGE Model: The Value of Disaggregation

We present a consistent microsimulation-AGE model combining the labour market AGE model PACE-L, data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and a discrete choice labour supply estimation. The model is used to analyse a reform that cuts the social assistance minimum income and lowers the transfer withdrawal rate in order to encourage labour force participation at the lower end of the wage distribution. ...

Selection, Alignment, and Their Interplay: Origins of Lifestyle Homogamy in Couple Relationships

The present study examines different processes leading to lifestyle homogamy in married and cohabiting couples using data from the German Socioeconomic Panel (n = 3,490 couples). The analyses first suggest that alignment over time promotes homogamy of leisure-related lifestyles, especially with respect to action-oriented activities. However, intermediate stages in the life course (i.e., phases of active ...