Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Completed fertility effects of family policy measures: evidence from a lifecycle model

We estimate a structural life-cycle model of fertility and female labour supply and use it to evaluate the effects of a number of key family policy measures based on data for Germany. Parental leave benefits, child benefits and subsidized childcare are found to have substantial fertility effects. Without these measures, completed fertility is estimated to be lower by 6%, 7%, and 10%, respectively. ...

Cultural Influences on the Fertility Behaviour of First- and Second-generation Immigrants in Germany

Based on a 1% sample of the German population, we study how fertility rates in the country of origin—a proxy for cultural imprint—influence the fertility outcomes of first- and second-generation female immigrants. We use both total fertility rates in the year of migration and a new measure of completed cohort fertility rates in the countries of origin as well as direct survey measures of fertility ...

Inequality in the Family: The Institutional Aspects of Wives' Earning Dependency

The Distribution of Economic Resources to Children in Germany

This paper investigates the redistributive impact of private and public childcare provision and education on children's resources in Germany between 2009 and 2013. It takes account of the multidimensionality of children's needs and access to economic resources by applying an extended income approach. Combining survey data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) with administrative data from ...

Striving for Equal Opportunities: Essays on the Distribution and Transmission of Economic Resources

The first paper investigates if the greater variety in living arrangements contributes to increased resource disparities among children in Germany. Children in single parent families are disadvantaged in at least three dimensions decisive for their later achievements: material standard of living, parental education, and parental childcare time. We compute multidimensional inequality and poverty indices ...

Like father, like son? A comparison of absolute and relative intergenerational labour income mobility in Germany and the US

Are children better off than their parents? This highly debated question in politics and economics is investigated by analysing the trends in absolute and relative intergenerational labour income mobility for Germany and the US. High quality panel data is used for this purpose; the SOEP for Germany and the PSID for the US. In Germany, 67% of sons born between 1955 and 1975 earned a significantly higher ...

The returns to occupational foreign language use: Evidence from Germany

This paper analyzes the wage premia associated with workers' occupational use of foreign languages in Germany. After eliminating time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity and other confounding factors, sizable returns of about 0.12 log points to applying fluent English skills are found in the general population, while the point estimate for immigrants is 0.26 log points. Returns to occupational ...

Conflicting Identities: Cosmopolitan or Anxious? Appreciating Concerns of Host Country Population Improves Attitudes Towards Immigrants

This paper connects insights from the literature on cosmopolitan values in political science, anxiety in social psychology, and identity economics in a vignette-style experiment. We asked German respondents about their attitudes towards a Syrian refugee, randomizing components of his description (N=662). The main treatment describes the refugee as being aware of and empathetic towards potential Germans' ...

Individual Determinants of Work Attendance: Evidence on the Role of Personality

We investigate the influence of personality as measured by the Big Five personality scale on absenteeism using representative data for Germany. In particular, the 2005 wave of the German Socio-Economic Panel provides detailed information on socio-economic background characteristics along with a Big Five personality scale. Estimates of a Logit model and of count data regression are used to analyze an ...

The Effect of Occupational Segregation by Gender on Wages: A Comparison of the United States and Germany