The formation of human capital is important for a society's welfare and economic success. Recent literature shows that child health can provide an important explanation for disparities in children's human capital development across different socio-economic groups. While this literature focuses...

In recent decades, many firms offered more discretion to their employees, often increasing the productivity of effort but also leaving more opportunities for shirking. These "high-performance work systems" are difficult to understand in terms of standard moral hazard models. We show...

While previous research on the reciprocal effects of citizens' issue attitudes and their party support emphasize citizens' issue positions, political competition revolves equally around issue salience, i.e., debates over which issue areas political parties should prioritize. Using multi-wave...

The affordability of housing has become a major topic of discussion in Germany among both social scientists and the public at large. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we provide rent-income ratios over more than two decades and show how they change with households’...

It is still widely debated how non-cognitive skills can be affected by policy intervention. For example, universal music education programs are becoming increasingly popular among policy makers in Germany and other developed countries. These are intended to give children from poor families the...

Nationally representative panel survey data for Germany and Australia are used to investigate the impact of working-time mismatches (i.e., differences between actual and desired work hours) on mental health, as measured by the Mental Component Summary Score from the SF-12. Fixed effects and...

This paper estimates the percentage of students who do not take up their federal need-based student financial aid entitlements and sheds light on determinants of this behavior. Against the background that educational mobility in Germany is low although extensive student financial aid for needy...

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...

We propose a new non-linear regression model for rating dependent variables. The rating scale model accounts for the upper and lower bounds of ratings. Parametric and semi-parametric estimation is discussed. An application investigates the relationship between stated health satisfaction and...

We quantify the importance of precautionary labor supply using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) for 2001-2012. We estimate dynamic labor supply equations augmented with a measure of wage risk. Our results show that married men choose about 2.5% of their hours of work or one week...