Vital statistics clearly indicate that the fertility rate in East Germany dropped sharply after German unification; moreover, it has not yet rebounded but remains stable at a low level. This paper uses data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) to examine births in the former German...

Typically, laboratory experiments suffer from homogeneous subject pools and self-selection biases. The usefulness of survey data is limited by measurement error and by the questionability of their behavioral relevance. Here we present a method integrating interactive experiments and...

Statistische Daten sind im allgemeinen - gemessen an idealtypischen Erhebungsbedingungen - nicht fehlerfrei, insbesondere können sie durch die Art, wie sie erhoben werden, beeinflusst werden ("Erhebungsartefakte"). Interviewereffekte spielen in diesem Zusammenhang in der Literatur eine...

This paper presents two new tools for the identification of faking interviewers in surveys. One method is based on Benford?s Law, and the other exploits the empirical observation that fakers most often produce answers with less variability than could be expected from the whole survey. We focus...

To the best of our knowledge, most of the few methodological studies which analyze the impact of faked interviews on survey results are based on 'artificial fakes' generated by project students in a 'laboratory environment'. In contrast, panel data provide a unique opportunity to identify data...

In Germany the foreign born population is made up of foreigners and so called "ethnic Germans" who migrated from eastern European countries to Germany. While the first group is confronted with problems arising from the typical German concept of ethnicity and citizenship, the latter are entitled...

We compare patterns of movements into and out of poverty by children in Britain and Germany using data from the British Household Panel Survey and the German Socio-Economic Panel for the period 1992-7. Compared to Germany, in Britain poverty persistence is greater, and poverty exit rates in...