External refereed essays

SOEP 2012: The 10th International Socio-Economic Panel User Conference: Editorial

Geschlechtsspezifische Verdienstunterschiede bei Führungskräften und sonstigen Angestellten in Deutschland: welche Relevanz hat der Frauenanteil im Beruf?

Der Beitrag vergleicht den Effekt der Geschlechterzusammensetzung im Beruf auf die Verdienstunterschiede von Frauen und Männern zwischen Führungspositionen und Nicht Führungspositionen in der Privatwirtschaft auf der Basis von Daten des Sozio-oekonomischen Panels (SOEP). Anhand gängiger theoretischer Ansätze wird die Hypothese entwickelt, dass in Führungspositionen die Qualifikationsanforderungen und ...

Longevity, Life-Cycle Behavior and Pension Reform

How can public pension systems be reformed to ensure fiscal stability in the face of increasing life expectancy? To address this question, we use micro data to estimate a structural life-cycle model of individuals' employment, retirement and consumption decisions. We calculate that, in the case of Germany, an increase of 3.76 years in the pension age thresholds or a cut of 26.8% in the per-year value ...

Personality Characteristics and the Decisions to Become and Stay Self-Employed

Based on a large, representative German household panel, we investigate to what extent the personality of individuals influences the entry decision into and the exit decision from self-employment. We reveal that some traits, such as openness to experience, extraversion, and risk tolerance affect entry, but different ones, such as agreeableness or different parameter values of risk tolerance, affect ...

Das Elterngeld und seine Wirkungen auf das Haushaltseinkommen junger Familien und die Erwerbstätigkeit von Müttern

Mit der Einführung des Elterngeldes im Jahr 2007 beabsichtigte die Bundesregierung die Bedingungen für Familien mit jungen Kindern zu verbessern. Die neue familienpolitische Leistung hatte mehrere Ziele, von denen in diesem Beitrag drei zentrale untersucht werden: Zum Ersten sollte für Eltern in der Frühphase der Elternschaft ein Schonraum geschaffen werden. Zum Zweiten ist es ein erklärtes Ziel des ...

Carbon Tariffs for Financing Clean Development

In order to address carbon leakage and preserve the competitiveness of domestic industries, some industrialized Annex I countries have proposed to implement carbon tariffs. These tariffs would be levied on energy-intensive imports from developing non-Annex I countries that have not agreed to binding emissions reductions. This action could have detrimental welfare impacts, especially on those developing ...

The Effects of Expanding the Generosity of the Statutory Sickness Insurance System

This article evaluates an expansion of employer-mandated sick leave from 80% to 100% of forgone gross wages in Germany. We employ and compare parametric difference-in-difference (DID), matching DID and mixed approaches. Overall workplace absences increased by at least 10% or 1 day per worker per year. We show that taking partial compliance into account increases coefficient estimates. Further, heterogeneity ...

Analyzing Regional Variation in Health Care Utilization Using (Rich) Household Microdata

This paper exploits rich SOEP microdata to analyze state-level variation in health care utilization in Germany. Unlike most studies in the field of the Small Area Variation (SAV) literature,our approach allows us to net out a large array of individual-level and state-level factors that may contribute to the geographic variation in health care utilization. The raw data suggest that state-level hospitalization ...

A Note on Allowing Negative Energy Prices in a Discretely Constrained MPEC

The Returns to Education for Opportunity Entrepreneurs, Necessity Entrepreneurs, and Paid Employees

We assess the relevance of formal education on the productivity of the self-employed, distinguishing between opportunity entrepreneurs, who voluntarily pursue a business opportunity, and necessity entrepreneurs, who lack alternative employment options. We expect differences in the returns to education between these groups due to different levels of control over the use of their human capital. The analysis ...

Personal Bankruptcy Law, Wealth, and Entrepreneurship: Evidence from the Introduction of a "Fresh Start" Policy

A personal bankruptcy law that allows for a "fresh start" not only reduces the individual risk involved in entrepreneurship, but may also lead to higher interest rates charged by creditors. Both effects are less relevant for wealthy potential entrepreneurs. This paper illustrates these effects in a model and tests the hypotheses derived by exploiting the introduction of a "fresh start" policy in Germany ...

Stability and Change in Affective Experience across the Adult Life Span: Analyses with a National Sample from Germany

Using cross-sectional and longitudinal data from a national sample spanning the adult life span, age differences in anger and sadness were explored. The cross-sectional and longitudinal findings consistently suggest that the frequency of anger increases during young adulthood, but then shows a steady decrease until old age. By contrast, the frequency of sadness remains stable over most of adulthood ...

Short-Time Work: The German Answer to the Great Recession

At the height of the economic crisis in mid-2009, the number of Germany's shorttime workers peaked at 1.5 million. Unemployment would otherwise have increased by approximately twice as much as it did. But while short-time work certainly helped to cushion the labour market impact of the crisis in Germany, the authors caution that the country's specific circumstances preclude simple generalizations regarding ...

An Empirical Assessment of the 2004 EU Merger Policy Reform

We evaluate the economic impact of the change in European merger legislation in 2004 and propose a general framework focusing on four different policy dimensions: predictability, decision errors, reversion of anti-competitive rents and deterrence. We find that after the reform, the predictability and the accuracy of decisions have improved. Yet, the policy shift away from prohibitions, which entail ...

Self-Employment and Conflict in Colombia

Many Colombians are confronted with the ongoing conflict that influences their decision making in everyday life, including their behavior in labor markets. This study focuses on the impact of violent conflict on self-employment, enlarging the usual determinants with a set of conflict variables. Our estimation strategy compares three different estimates: one from fixed-effects panel data (OLS-FE), estimates ...

Consent When Linking Survey Data with Administrative Records: The Role of the Interviewer

Linking survey data with administrative records is becoming more common in the social sciences in recent years. Regulatory frameworks require the respondent's consent to this procedure in most cases. Similar to non-response, non-consent may lead to selective samples and could pose a problem when using the combined data for analyses. Thus investigating the selectivity and the determinants of the consent ...

Choices which Change Life Satisfaction: Similar Results for Australia, Britain and Germany

Using data from national socio-economic panel surveys in Australia, Britain and Germany, this paper analyzes the effects of individual preferences and choices on subjective well-being (SWB). It is shown that, in all three countries, preferences and choices relating to life goals/values, partner's personality, hours of work, social participation and healthy lifestyle have substantial and similar effects ...

Does the Box-Cox Transformation Help in Forecasting Macroeconomic Time Series?

The paper investigates whether transforming a time series leads to an improvement in forecasting accuracy. The class of transformations that is considered is the Box-Cox power transformation, which applies to series measured on a ratio scale. We propose a nonparametric approach for estimating the optimal transformation parameter based on the frequency domain estimation of the prediction error variance, ...

Forecasting Contemporaneous Aggregates with Stochastic Aggregation Weights

Many contemporaneously aggregated variables have stochastic aggregation weights. We compare different forecasts for such variables, including univariate forecasts of the aggregate, a multivariate forecast of the aggregate that uses information from the disaggregated components, a forecast which aggregates a multivariate forecast of the disaggregate components and the aggregation weights, and a forecast ...

Linking Concurrent Self-Reports and Retrospective Proxy Reports about the Last Year of Life: A Prevailing Picture of Life Satisfaction Decline

OBJECTIVE: We examined the extent to which retrospective proxy reports of well-being mirror participant self-reports at 12-24 months before death and how proxy reports of well-being change over the last year of life. We also explored the role of sociodemographic, cognitive, and health factors of both participants and proxies in moderating such associations.Method.We used retrospective proxy ratings ...