Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Less social health insurance, more private supplementary insurance? Empirical evidence from Germany

Based on individual level data from Germany, we analyze the effect of changes in the compulsory benefit package of the social health insurance on the demand for supplementary private insurance, employing a difference-in-differences approach. The focus is on the exclusion of dental prostheses from the benefit package in 1997 and its re-inclusion in 1999. Individuals born prior to 1979 serve as control ...

The Case of Germany

Technical Change, Inequality and the Polarization of Work: A Structured Review of Concepts and New Evidence for Germany, 1984-2003 (Master thesis)

Why Should Women Get Less? Evidence on the Gender Pay Gap from Multifactorial Survey Experiments

Gender pay gaps likely persist in Western societies because both men and women consider somewhat lower earnings for female employees than for otherwise similar male employees to be fair. Two different theoretical approaches explain “legitimate” wage gaps: same-gender referent theory and reward expectations theory. The first approach states that women compare their lower earnings primarily with that ...

Long-term evidence of retrospective voting: A natural experiment from the German Democratic Republic

The paper investigates long-lasting electoral punishment. Decades of communist socialization and the repressive rule of a single-party have left their left-wing fingerprint on East Germany. In this paper we show that voters act rationally: given negative life circumstances experienced under the rule of the communist party, they display retrospective voting even decades later. Our insight is based on ...

Intergenerational Correlations of Extreme Right-Wing Party Preferences and Attitudes toward Immigration

This study analyzes the importance of parental socialization on the development of children's far right-wing preferences and attitudes towards immigration. Using longitudinal data from Germany, our intergenerational estimates suggest that the strongest and most important predictor for young people's right-wing extremism are parents' right-wing extremist attitudes. While intergenerational ...

Does the Burglar Also Disturb the Neighbor? Crime Spillovers on Individual Well-being

Indirect psychological effects induced by crime are likely to contribute significantly to the total costs of crime beyond the financial costs of direct victimization. Using detailed crime statistics for the whole of Germany and linking them to individual-level mental health information from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we analyze whether local crime rates affect the mental health of residents. ...

Citizenship, Fertility and Parental Investment

Citizenship rights are associated with better economic opportunities for immigrants. This paper studies how in a country with a large fraction of temporary migrants the fertility decisions of foreign citizens respond to a change in the rules that regulate child legal status at birth. The introduction of birthright citizenship in Germany in 2000, represented a positive shock to the returns to investment ...

Risk Aversion and the Teaching Profession : An Analysis Including Different Forms of Risk Aversion, Different Control Groups, Selection and Socialization Effects

Risk aversion might affect current and potential teachers’ reaction to reforms, in particular payment reforms. However, evidence on teachers’ risk aversion in comparison to other occupations is limited. The present study is based on twelve waves of a representative German data set (N = 18,381) and shows that teaching relates positively to risk aversion, especially to risk aversion with respect to occupational ...

Where Does the Good Shepherd Go? Civic Virtue and Sorting into Public Sector Employment

Several studies have analyzed motives to work in the public versus private sector. However, research on prosocial motivation in the context of public sector employment has largely neglected civic virtue, the motive to contribute to society. This study considers civic virtue in addition to other possible motives, using a representative, longitudinal dataset of employees in Germany including 63,180 observations ...