Over the last decades the German education system underwent numerous reforms in order to improve "equality of opportunity", i.e. to guarantee all pupils equal access to higher education. At the same time internationally comparative evidence yields that Germany features particularly low...

This paper explores determinants of church attendance and the formation of 'religious human capital' in Germany within a Becker-style allocation-of-time framework. The analysis is based on data derived from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). Taking advantage of the longitudinal structure...

Empirical studies on the earnings effects of tobacco use have found significant wage penalties attached to smoking. We produce evidence that suggests that these estimates are significantly upward biased. The bias arises from a general failure in the literature to control for the past smoking...

This paper investigates the short-term effects of public smoking bans on individual smoking behavior. In 2007 and 2008, state-level smoking bans were gradually introduced in all of Germany's sixteen federal states. We exploit this variation in the timing of state bans to identify the effect that...

Using individual based micro-data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), I analyze the cyclicality of real wages for male workers within employer-employee matches over the period 1984-2004, and compare different wage measures: the standard hourly wage rate, hourly wage earnings...

Whereas the number of paid overtime hours declined over the last two decades in Germany, a different trend can be observed for unpaid overtime. We analyze future consequences of unpaid work with respect to a worker's career advancement, such as higher future wages and probabilities of promotion...

Empirical evidence from several countries reveals that self-rated health is a valid predictor of mortality. So far, there have been no studies conducted for Germany. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (GSOEP) we confirm the relationship between self-rated health and mortality...