Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

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 ...

Tax-Benefit Systems in Europe and the US: Between Equity and Efficiency

Whether observed differences in redistributive policies across countries are the result of differences in social preferences or efficiency constraints is an important question that paves the debate about the optimality of welfare regimes. To shed new light on this question, we estimate labor supply elasticities on microdata and adopt an inverted optimal tax approach to characterize the redistributive ...

Comparing Inequality Aversion across Countries When Labor Supply Responses Differ

We analyze to which extent social inequality aversion differs across nations when controlling for actual country differences in labor supply responses. Towards this aim, we estimate labor supply elasticities at both extensive and intensive margins for 17 EU countries and the US. Using the same data, inequality aversion is measured as the degree of redistribution implicit in current tax-benefit systems, ...

Distributional Consequences of Labor Demand Adjustments to a Downturn: A Model-Based Approach with Application to Germany 2008-09

Macro-level changes can have substantial effects on the distribution of resources at the household level. While it is possible to speculate about which groups are likely to be hardesthit, detailed distributional studies are still largely backward-looking. This paper suggests a straightforward approach to gauge the distributional and fiscal implications of large output changes at an early stage. We ...

Distributional consequences of labor-demand shocks: the 2008–2009 recession in Germany

The distributional consequences of the recent economic crisis are still broadly unknown. While it is possible to speculate which groups are likely to be hardest-hit, detailed distributional studies are still largely backward-looking due to a lack of real-time microdata. This paper studies the distributional and fiscal implications of output changes in Germany 2008–2009, using data available prior to ...

No Claim, No Pain: Measuring the Non-Take-up of Social Assistance Using Register Data

The main objectives of social assistance benefits, including poverty alleviation and labor-market or social reintegration, can be seriously compromised if support is difficult to access. While recent studies point to high non-take-up rates, existing evidence does not make full use of the information recorded by benefit agencies. Most studies have to rely on interview-based data, with misreporting and ...

In-work policies in Europe: killing two birds with one stone?