We provide a concise introduction to a household-panel data infrastructure that provides the international research community with longitudinal data of private households in Germany since 1984: the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). We demonstrate the comparative strength of the SOEP data in...

This paper is based on recently collected and rich survey data of a representative sample of entrants into unemployment in Germany. Our data include a large number of migration variables, allowing us to adapt a recently developed concept of ethnic identity: the ethnosizer. To shed further light...

Taking advantage of the panel structure of the data, the impact of intermarriage on labor market productivity as measured by earnings is examined. Contrarily to previous studies which rely on instrumental variable techniques, selection issues are addressed within a fixed effects framework. The...

Why are female entrepreneurs so rare? Women have both to a lower entry rate into selfemployment and a higher exit rate in Germany. To explain the gender gap, a structural microeconometric model of the transition rates is estimated, which includes a standard risk aversion parameter. As inputs...

When unemployed persons go into business, they often are characterized as necessity entrepreneurs, because push factors, namely their unemployment, likely prompted their decision. In contrast to this, business founders who have been previously employed represent opportunity entrepreneurs because...

Our study investigates the link between bank lending behavior and macroeconomic uncertainty. We develop a dynamic model of a bank's value maximization that results in a negative relationship between loan to capital ratio and macroeconomic uncertainty. This proposition is tested using a panel of...

The 2004 and 2007 enlargements of the European Union were unprecedented in a number of economic and policy aspects. This essay provides a broad and in-depth account of the effects of the post-enlargement migration flows on the receiving as well as sending countries in three broader areas: labour...

This paper empirically analyzes whether the character-based approach, which is based on the personality structure and the human capital of business founders, allows prediction of entrepreneurial success. A unique data set is used consisting of 414 previously unemployed persons whose personal...

In this paper I assert that the entrepreneurial spirit can also exist in salaried jobs. I study the determinants of wages and the labor market success of two kinds of entrepreneurial women in Germany - self-employed and salaried businesswomen - and investigate whether ethnicity is important in...