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Driven by two theoretical models of the resiliency framework, this paper examines the compensatory and protective role of interacting with peers in late adolescence in inhibiting the intergenerational transmission of poverty into young adulthood. We suggest different compensatory and protective effects of three peer contexts, referring to specific advantages of group-based friendship networks (i.e. cliques) in comparison with dyadic best friendships and romantic relationships. Further, we assume heterogeneity in the peer resilience mechanisms by age, migration background, and gender. Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and random-effects linear probability models, we indeed find conditional compensatory influences as well as an unconditional protective effect of clique interaction in late adolescence for the intergenerational transmission of poverty. Hence, frequent interaction within friendship cliques compensates the deleterious effect of long-term poverty in adolescence on the risk of poverty in young adulthood with increasing age as well as particularly for first-generation immigrants. Further, the engagement with peer cliques in late adolescence attenuates the association between long-term youth poverty and adulthood poverty and thus helps to protect against the intergenerational transmission of poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After decades in which gender relations, as anchored in work-family policies and egalitarian gender ideologies, moved towards greater equality, the status quo is currently being challenged. Gender-ambivalent ideologies have spread in both the political and private realms. It is unclear how the rise in gender-ambivalence documented in current research relates to party identification. On the one hand, gender ambivalence may represent a variation of post-materialist liberal values corresponding with support for centre-left parties in Germany. On the other, ambivalence may reflect a modified form of traditionalism and thus, a step to the left among voters leaning towards right-wing and conservative parties. This paper uses the Leitbild Survey 2012 to provide empirical evidence to fill this research gap. In line with cross-national research, latent class analyses reveal four main gender ideologies among young Germans: unidimensional 'egalitarian' and 'moderate traditional', as well as ambivalent, multidimensional 'secondary earner', and 'intensive parenting'. Multinomial regression models show that egalitarian class members identify with centre-left parties while members of the ambivalent, multidimensional secondary earner, and intensive parenting classes as well as those of the moderate traditional class identify more strongly with centre-right parties. In light of the broader literature on gender ideology change, which documents a steep decline in traditionalism, our cross-sectional findings may be interpreted as capturing a step to the left among voters leaning towards right-wing and conservative parties in Germany, who now accept new mothers combining care-giving and part-time-work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the German labour market, research hints towards a reversal in gender-specific risk of becoming unemployed: While women previously faced higher risk than men, in recent years, they have consistently lower risk. This paper analyses this reversal by focusing on the role of occupational gender segregation. I discuss theoretical differences in the labour supply and demand structure and thus in the unemployment risk of male- and female-dominated occupations caused by crowding and technological and sectoral change. Using the German National Educational Panel Study combined with occupation level data, I analyse the transition to unemployment over three decades. The results confirm gender-specific trends over time: While women faced higher risk of becoming unemployed in the 1980s, they face significantly lower risk than men in the 21st century. A Karlson-Holm-Breen decomposition shows that the lower risk of women in the newest decade under observation is mediated by the unequal distribution of men and women over the occupational structure. Yet, the higher risk of women in the 1980s cannot be traced back to differences in male- and female-dominated occupations. On the contrary, the results suggest that women were more likely to become unemployed in that decade independent of their occupation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Not all high school students who wish to study think that they will be able to realize this wish. This article examines whether admission barriers to higher education (HE) are a potential reason for this mismatch between educational aspirations and expectations and whether they are more constraining for students from socially less advantaged backgrounds. It does so for the German context in which the role of admission barriers for social inequality in HE has long been neglected. Empirically, the paper uses a unique combination of individual data on high school students' educational aspirations and expectations and institutional data on admission barriers that vary by field of study. Findings indicate that the socially most privileged students stick to their college aspiration regardless of admission barriers to their aspired field of study. However, they seem to be willing to compromise their preferred field of study if this comes along with high admission barriers. Contrastingly, socially less privileged students seem willing to compromise both their general college aspiration and their aspired field of study if admission appears difficult. The concluding section discusses the implications of these findings for social inequality in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the paper is to analyse the extent and determinants of panel attrition in the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). The fact that, after five waves, in some countries the response rate has declined to about 50%, leads to concerns about the representativeness of the remaining participants. We find the extent and determinants of panel attrition to reveal high variability across countries as well as for different waves within one country. Differences were also found when comparing attrition behaviour across different surveys running parallel in the same countries, as was the case for Germany and the United Kingdom (UK). Response rates are found to depend strongly on whether households moved during the sample period and whether the interviewer in the sample period changed. Compared to these two influences, all other characteristics are of minor importance. Despite these different attrition rates, neither is the analysis of income biased, nor is the ranking of national results disturbed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper addresses the question of if and how processes of cyclical crowding-out contribute to the disproportionate increase in unemployment of the less-educated during recessions. To this end, transitions from unemployment to low-skilled jobs and vice versa are analysed using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). It is found that skilled workers increasingly occupy low-skilled jobs during recessions and thus diminish employment chances of unskilled persons. Specifically, the analyses show evidence for crowding-out at the worker inflow: during recessions, the chances of securing a low-skilled job deteriorate to a greater extent for unskilled people than for the skilled, suggesting that in times of poor employment prospects, job-competition between unskilled and skilled people for low-skilled jobs increases. However, the analysis does not show evidence for crowding-out at the worker outflow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the unemployment dynamics of various immigrant groups in Germany. Several different groups are compared against the native-born population: guest workers, ethnic Germans, immigrants from the EU-15 or other western industrialized countries, non-EU immigrants and finally second-generation immigrants. Event history techniques are applied to German Socio-Economic Panel data from the second half of the 1990s. The analyses underscore the importance of human capital and labour market segmentation in the employment exclusion of immigrant populations. The study contends that the higher risk of unemployment among guest worker immigrants, more recent newcomers from outside the EU and ethnic Germans is only partially related to their inferior human capital characteristics. In fact it appears largely due to their unfavourable labour market allocation, i.e. their over-representation in occupations and economic branches particularly vulnerable during economic slowdown and restructuring. The analyses also show that unemployed immigrants, with the exception of those coming recently from EU-15 countries and second-generation immigrants, retain their outsider status even if successful in finding employment, being largely channelled into the unskilled labour market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The German vocational education system, especially its dual system of apprenticeship training, is often praised for providing vocational skills geared to current practices in specific occupations. Yet only about half of all Germans currently have jobs that match their vocational education. This paper uses data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, a nationally representative household panel study, to examine a variety of individual and structural level variables hypothesized to influence the likelihood of an individual being employed in a position that fits his or her vocational training. It also identifies factors that influence the probability that an individual moves from a job that does not fit his or her training to a position that does. Finally, the paper examines earnings differences between persons with varying types of vocational education and considers if these differences depend on whether or not an individual is employed in a job that fits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on career mobility conceived as a sequence of job-shifts within and between firms, in this paper we compare Germany and Poland with regard to job-shift patterns found among men and women in these countries. The paper aims at testing a series of hypotheses on the comparative impact of labour-market segmentation (industrial sector, firm size, and social class) in welfare-capitalist and state-socialist systems. The hypotheses are tested against retrospective longitudinal data on job histories of the 1939-41 birth-cohorts from the 1981-2 German Life History Study and the 1972 Polish Life History Study. We find patterned differences between the two countries in regard to the effect of individual characteristics on career mobility, in regard to the impact of labour-market segmentation, and in regard to the effect of gender. To our knowledge, this is the first comparative investigation of this kind. Some implications of our findings for tracing the impact of current East European market reforms are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper constructs a time-series model of trade union growth and decline in the Federal Republic of Germany (1955-1986) by testing and combining eleven economic and socio-political hypotheses prevalent in the German and international trade union literature. The model employs wages, prices, unemployment, employment, and the proportion of foreigners in the workforce as explanatory variables. It proves to be satisfactory when judged in terms of usual statistical criteria such as overall goodness of fit, and signs, magnitudes, and significance of the estimated regression coefficients, as well as in terms of its structural stability, data sensitivity, and predictive ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the outset, this article describes in detail how the European Union has replaced the nation-state concept of equality with a transnational idea of equality for all European citizens. It then investigates the extent to which German respondents support the idea of non-discrimination between German nationals and other Europeans. The existing literature argues that the process of opening up the borders of the nation-states will challenge the traditional symbolic code of equality held by citizens, and impact negatively on the existing distribution of resources. In particular, those people who lack economic resources and hold more traditional or right wing political orientations are likely to oppose the notion of Europe-wide equality. However, the empirical results show that the majority of the German population supports the idea that citizens from other European countries should enjoy the same rights as nationals. Most of this paper’s hypotheses are either falsified or correlations are rather weak, and these findings bring us to the conclusion that, at least as far as the German population is concerned, there is no evidence for a strong socio-structural or value-orientated cleavage with regard to equal rights for all Europeans. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the present paper we compare public views regarding the equality of rights foreigners deserve in Germany and Israel using data from two national representative samples (ALLBUS in Germany, 1996 and Attitudes Towards Minorities Survey in Israel, 1999). The data reveal that anti-immigrant sentiments (as expressed by the denial to grant rights to foreign workers) are more pronounced in Israel than in Germany. These findings hold even after controlling for individual socio-economic and demographic characteristics and differential levels of threat. In both countries, support for foreigners' rights tend to increase with level of education and to decline with age. In Germany, support for rights is also affected by income (positively), right-wing orientation (negatively), and residence in East Germany (negatively). In both countries, the most important determinant of support for foreigners' rights is the perception of threat. The greater the threat the more likely citizens are to deny rights to labour migrants. It should be noted, however, that the impact of threat on attitudes towards foreigners' rights as well as the impact of political orientation (right-wing) is more pronounced in Germany than in Israel. While threat is the more important determinant of anti-foreigner sentiments in both societies, it only partially intervenes between individual characteristics and attitudes toward foreigners' rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas variance in preferences is a central explanation for human behaviour in the social sciences, economists traditionally avoid using preferences to explain behaviour. Rather, change in behaviour or different kinds of behaviour are explained solely by differences in the economic restrictions imposed on an individual. Whereas restrictions have been analysed as monetary constraints in traditional economics, Gary Becker has broadened this term. In his work, he tried to integrate 'time'--the non-monetary restriction--into the economic constraints. In our paper we test empirically the effects of monetary and time restrictions on the travel-mode choice of a representative sample of the German population. We do this by means of testing some hypotheses from Becker's work on microcensus data from Germany. These data include the following variables: travel-mode choice, distance of travel, time of travel, as well as some additional socioeconomic characteristics. Results of introducing these additional socioeconomic variables will also raise the question whether it is really true that only monetary and time costs matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article compares the labor-force transitions of the wives of unemployed and employed men in Great Britain and West Germany. In Germany, when a man becomes unemployed, his wife is mote likely to enter employment, than when he was employed. In Britain, when a man becomes unemployed, his wife is less likely to enter employment than if he were employed, in particular she is less likely to enter part-time employment. Both of these mechanisms come into effect when the husband has been unemployed for 13 months or more and is normally receiving means-tested benefit. The wives of unemployed men have, on average, spent less of their post-education life in the labour market, and this affects their propensity to enter employment. However, one finds an effect of husband's current labour-force status, i.e. unemployment, even after controlling for this. While there may be some effect of the wife being a reluctant breadwinner, there is no reason to suspect that this effect would be much larger in Britain than in Germany. Instead, there is a strong suspicion that there is a disincentive effect of means-tested benefit in Great Britain, which partly explains why the wives of unemployed men are less likely to enter employment than others.

Support for German extreme right‐wing parties fluctuated strongly in the 1990s, reaching its highest level of 8.7 per cent in September 1992. Support for these parties also varied between regions. In this paper, we attempt to explain this variation over time and region using individual and contextual characteristics. Hypotheses formulated at the individual and contextual levels were tested by means of multi‐level logistic regression, using monthly surveys conducted over the period 1989–1998 (N=114,798). The results show that extreme right‐wing popularity is greater in periods when the number of asylum seekers is high, whereas the unemployment level does not increase support for these parties. At the individual level, we found that unemployed people, manual workers, self‐employed people, and young people, as well as the lower educated and non‐religious, were more likely to support extreme right‐wing parties. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The extent to which achievement gaps become wider or narrower over the course of schooling is a topic that is widely discussed, both publicly and in educational research. This study examines whether absolute achievement (in language and math skills) and social origin gaps grow throughout the school career. To investigate the achievement growth of three German student cohorts (N = 14,273) at different stages of their school career (primary school, lower secondary school, and upper secondary school), I use multilevel models to estimate the effects of prior achievement and social origin on achievement growth. The results consistently suggest a negative association between prior achievement and subsequent growth; hence, initially low-performing students have higher achievement gains than initially high-performing students. Additionally, I find that social origin gaps remain stable over time. However, when controlling for initial achievement, slightly growing socio-economic status gaps can be observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the role of formal childcare under the age of three in tackling the early social inequality in children's cognitive and socio-emotional competencies in Germany, by drawing on the new-born sample of the National Educational Panel Study. To this end, we study first whether the access to formal early childhood education and care (ECEC) differs by parents' socio-economic status (SES), by means of logistic regressions. Second, we analyse the main effect of attending ECEC institutions. Third, we ask whether the effect of attending ECEC on children's competencies differs by SES. We perform OLS regression with inverse probability weighting to address confounding bias possibly arising from selection into care arrangements. Moreover, we developed a counterfactual analysis to compare the observed SES gradient in children's competencies with two alternative extreme scenarios, one characterized by the absence of ECEC, and the other by universalistic access to ECEC. Our findings show that ECEC attendance is socially stratified and suggest an equalizing impact of ECEC institutions. We conclude that ECEC can play a compensatory function on social stratification, by making the expansion of formal early childcare expenditures a fruitful investment for more equal opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper builds on a French-German comparison of how individuals' education and their social class position are related to each other. Labour-force surveys from the early 1970s and 1990s are used as the empirical basis. We analyse patterns of occupational stratification by education from three perspectives: change over time in each country, cross-national similarities and differences, and gender-specific variation. Focusing on the historical perspective, our analyses reveal substantial changes in each nation's pattern of occupational stratification by education. From the cross-national perspective, we observe France and Germany as countries where relatively strong education effects prevail compared with other countries. Despite a slight trend of convergence in some aspects over time, the exact patterns of occupational stratification by education, however, vary. They are highly structured by the institutional arrangements of the respective educational and employment settings. Due to gender-specific variation in the returns to education in the early 1970s, especially in Germany, we find the same pattern of cross-national dissimilarities in the link between education and social-class position for women as for men only in the early 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we address the issue of who is most likely to participate in further training, for what reasons and at what stage of the life course. Special emphasis is given to the impact of labour-market policies to encourage further education and a person's individual or cohort possibilities to participate in further education. We apply a Cox proportional hazard model to data from the West German Life History Study, separately for women and men, within and outside the firm. Younger cohorts show not only higher proportions of participation in further education and training at early stages of the life course, they also continue to participate in higher numbers during later stages of the life course. General labour-force participation reduces and tenure with the same firm increases the propensity to participate in further education and training. Contrary to expectations, in Germany labour-market segmentation has been enhanced rather than reduced by further education and training policies, since in the firm-specific labour-market segment, i.e. skilled jobs in large firms, and in the public sector both women and men had a higher probability of participation. Particularly favourable conditions for participate in further education outside the firm prevailed during the first years of the labour promotion act (Arbeftsförderungsgesetz) between 1969 and 1974, but women did not benefit to the same extent as men. Training policies are, therefore, in need of continuous assessment based on a goal-achievement evaluation to avoid any unintended effects of such policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates upward mobility in the Danish labour market. The main question is whether the welfare state provides opportunities for upward mobility which are relatively independent of educational and skill barriers. It is argued that Denmark is an interesting test case because it shares, with Germany, a vocational training system which is often believed to suppress mobility and generate rigidity in the labour market. The empirical analysis shows that in the Danish case there is indeed a remarkable amount of upward mobility which cannot be explained by education and vocational training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inglehart's thesis of the 'Silent Revolution' states that the priorities of Western publics have gradually shifted from materialist toward postmaterialist values. An important aspect of this thesis is the socialization hypothesis, predicting that one's (post)-materialist values are stable during adulthood. This paper tests this hypothesis using panel data for the United States, Germany and the Netherlands. For this purpose several multiple indicator two-wave models are developed including (i) a correction for the dependency between the indicators (because of the ranking of the items) and (ii) item specific factors. Application of these models to the data indicates a strong stability of postmaterialist values during adulthood, especially for the United States and the Netherlands. The implications of the findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research on immigrants in the FRG and the USA suggests that their amount of education, the country in which they obtained it, and their labour force experience both before and after migrating all have important effects on theft skills in the language of the host country. This paper explores these influences on the English language proficiency of four groups of immigrants to Australia: those from North-Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean basin, and the Third World. The data are drawn from the one per cent public use sample of the 1981 Australian Census. The models are flexible OLS specifications that permit a variety of curvilinear and interaction effects. The results generally parallel those for the FRG and the USA. One important difference from the results for the USA is that the harmful effect of foreign labour force experience is greater than the beneficial effect of labour force experience in the host country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This data brief introduces the Friendship and Identity in School (FIS) dataset. The FIS data are school-based longitudinal social network data, which have become increasingly important in recent years. Including information on 2,500 adolescents in nine secondary schools in the German federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia, the FIS data have four important key features that make them uniquely suited for studying the co-evolution of friendship networks and group identities or other time-varying individual characteristics. Specifically, the data include (i) fine-grained multidimensional measures of youth' ethnic, national, and religious identities, (ii) comparatively large social networks that span multiple classrooms, (iii) up to six waves over four and a half years, and (iv) an ethnoreligiously diverse sample. Besides friendship and identity, the data include other network dimensions such as romantic relations or dislike as well as repeated measurements of various individual attributes ranging from perceived discrimination over intergroup attitudes and religion to leisure time activities and students' perceptions of parents' identities and attitudes. In combination, the FIS data provide rich longitudinal information that allows researchers to study the development, change, and interplay of youth' group identities and friendship networks as well as broader questions concerning intergroup relations, network formation, and peer influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While existing research has found negative birth order effects on competences and educational attainment in various Western countries with different educational systems, it is unclear whether these findings also hold in families with migration background. We argue that in migrant families where children were born in the host country, birth order effects on secondary school track placement should be weak or even reversed. In these families, parents' host country-specific resources and knowledge of the education system are likely to be comparatively low. Consequently, older siblings who were born and educated in the host country can be an important source of information and support on educational matters for their younger siblings. Moreover, parental knowledge of the education system should increase with the educational career of each of their children. Family fixed-effects models based on representative data from the German Microcensus show negative birth order effects on secondary school track placement for native, first-generation migrant, and interethnic siblings, but not for second-generation migrant siblings. The empirical results indicate that negative birth order effects are not necessarily universal, but that children may even benefit from having older siblings under certain conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are numerous challenges to studying structural inequality in sexual and gender minority (SGM) populations, from the difficulty of obtaining a representative sample to issues comparing data across populations. This data brief illustrates how the largest household panel survey in Germany, the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), and its recent nationwide boost sample of SGM households, Sample Q, have addressed these challenges. We discuss the case of the SOEP and its boost sample to illustrate the untapped potentials that lie in other national household panels for research into the lived experiences of SGM people, couples, and families. Based on the SOEP example, we show the potential for cross-sectional comparative, retrospective, and longitudinal life course research using the detailed information on the extended families (parents, children, siblings, and relatives) of SGM respondents in household panel surveys. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how contact with perceived foreigners affects natives' attitudes towards immigration. Using six waves of individual level panel data from Germany (2007–2017), we find that natives' reported mutual visits with foreigners reduce worries about immigration. However, the results do not imply an increase in this effect in the course of repeated contact. Our analyses also consider the possibility that the effect of out-group contact on attitudes is heterogeneous across social groups. Our results show that contact effects are not restricted to younger age groups but also hold for older age groups. Surprisingly, there are stronger reductions in worries among right-leaning compared to left-leaning individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fixed-term contracts in Europe have recently become the subject of both policy and research interest, seen as particularly relevant in the transition from school to work. Some commentators argue that fixed-term contracts have an integrative function in the transition from school to work, providing a `bridge' to the labour market. A contrasting perspective is that they hinder successful integration into the labour market by leading to a repeating cycle of fixed-term jobs and unemployment. We investigate this issue in Germany, a country with a regulated labour market and a `co-ordinated' transition from education to work. Using life history data we consider who gets a fixed-term contract at the beginning of working life in Germany and how this affects their subsequent labour market career. Our first key finding is that fixed-term contracts are found among those for whom the school-to-work transition is not so co-ordinated, including both high-skilled and low-skilled labour market entrants. Our second finding is that, after five years, the unemployment rates of those who started with fixed-term contracts and those who started with permanent contracts converge. Beginning working life with a fixed-term contract does not clearly signal a `bad start' in Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two competing theories of social support and role specialization have been invoked to explain how marital status affects labour market outcomes. Whereas evidence of beneficial labour market outcomes among married men and employed married women favours a social support perspective, evidence of married women's reduced labour market participation corresponds to a role specialization perspective. We make two contributions to this literature. First, we apply both theories to first jobs in positions for which the employee is overeducated (educational attainment exceeding job requirements). Second, we employ preference theory to show how selection into marriage shapes its association with being in a position of overeducation. To account for potential selection, we model the probability of being married and the risk of starting a career in overeducation simultaneously based on retrospective data from the German National Educational Panel Study. In line with the theory of role specialization, married women seem to be more likely to start in overeducation than unmarried women. However, adjusting for selection into marriage yields lower risks of overeducation for married women and men in comparison to their unmarried counterparts. This supports the social support perspective on overqualification and highlights how selection into marriage shapes its association with labour market outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I evaluate whether educational attainment in Germany is stratified by parental wealth and at which transitions stratification emerges. I propose a four-stage model to capture the emergence of stratification in the German education system, which is characterized by early between-school tracking: (i) transition to the tracked secondary school, (ii) attended track in the last year of mandatory schooling, (iii) highest school-leaving certificate, and (iv) transition to vocational or tertiary education. Results suggest that stratification by parental wealth emerges at all four stages, and, therefore, accumulates over the stages. Children living in wealthy households are 20 per cent more likely to attend the highest track in fifth grade and to obtain the highest school-leaving certificate and are 40 per cent more likely to enroll in tertiary education compared to children at the bottom of the wealth distribution. Furthermore, parental wealth seems to be particularly effective in preventing negative outcomes like leaving school without a certificate or not finding a fully qualifying vocational training. Among those who do not obtain the formal requirements to enroll in tertiary education, those with wealthy parents are more likely to start dual vocational training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines over-time trends in intergenerational class mobility based on cohorts of labour market entrants in Germany and the UK since the 1950s. We calculate absolute and relative mobility rates, separately for men and women, using the German Socio-Economic Panel (1984–2016), the UK Household Longitudinal Study (2009–2016), and the UK Labour Force Survey (2014–2017). Regarding absolute mobility, we find marked country differences in upward and downward rates. In Germany, downward mobility decreased, while upward mobility rose. In the UK, downward mobility increased, while upward mobility declined. We provide evidence that these differences can be linked to contrasting changes in the distribution of origin and destination classes. Regarding relative mobility, striking country similarities appear. For both countries, we observe increases in social fluidity for respondents entering the labour market during the 1950s and 1960s that cease to continue for cohorts thereafter. Comparisons between adjacent cohorts do not provide evidence that social fluidity follows cyclical developments of the economy or shorter-term volatilities in the labour market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the backdrop of rising support for right- and left-wing populist parties in Europe, a long-standing argument has been that the more vulnerable strata of society are deprived by structural economic change as well as increasing social inequality and express their grievances by voting for radical and populist parties. Previous research has tested the thesis either based on cross-sectional data and vague proxies for past income developments or used objective short-term measures of income changes. In this study, we propose a more thorough test using longitudinal data and measures of objective relative deprivation, objective absolute deprivation, and subjective deprivation. Using SOEP data for 2016, our results show little support that those with lower incomes identify more with the populist right-wing AfD in Germany. Furthermore, we find no evidence that objectively falling behind is associated with more support for the AfD and the populist left-wing party die Linke among the less well off. Rather, support for the AfD is highest among the less well-off with stable incomes and the less well-off who perceive their incomes as having been unstable. For die Linke, support is highest among the less well-off who experienced absolute income gains and the less well-off who perceive their incomes as having been upwardly or downwardly mobile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study examines to what extent employees in Germany are afraid of losing their jobs, depending on the degree of computerization of their occupations. So far, empirical evidence on the relationship between digital transformation and subjective job insecurity is scarce. We distinguish three interrelated insecurity measures: cognitive job insecurity, i.e. the individual assessment of job loss probability, labour market insecurity, i.e. the perceived availability of job alternatives, and affective job insecurity, i.e. the extent to which individuals are worried about a potential job loss. The analysis is based on a large-scale panel study from Germany and refers to the period between 2013 and 2016. Computerization is measured by the occupation-specific substitution potential, i.e. the extent to which occupational tasks are substitutable by computers or computer-controlled machines. The results from multivariate panel analysis suggest that the digital transformation has a negative impact on cognitive job insecurity. We do not find effects on labour market insecurity and affective job insecurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many Western societies experience recurring patterns of violence against ethnic minorities, immigrants, refugees, and other asylum seekers, making it important to better understand which conditions increase (or decrease) the likelihood of hate crimes. In this article, we test the relevance of different geographic, social, economic, and political conditions for attacks on refugees. To this end, we conduct an event-history analysis for Germany between 2014 and 2017, when Germany experienced a sharp rise and subsequent decline in assaults on refugees with up to 142 personal and miscellaneous (such as assaults and insults) and 11 arson attacks on refugee homes and refugees per week. We analyse these incidents at the district level and derive hypotheses from theoretical considerations on geographic proximity, social similarity, political opportunity structures, competition for resources, opportunities of contact with foreigners, and differences between East and West Germany. Irrespective of the type of attack, the results of Cox regression models support our theoretical reasoning on diffusion processes, geographical proximity, and the contact hypothesis. There is no support for the model-adopter similarity and competition-for-resources hypothesis. The type of violence matters with regard to the importance of political opportunity structures and differences between East and West Germany. Our findings show the importance of differentiating between different types of violence and accounting for the context-dependency of ethnic violence for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various critics, mainly at the end of the 1950s and in the early 1960s, charged Parsons with the inability to understand social change and with normative determinism. This criticism has been aptly contradicted in the 1980s. However, such recent rehabilitation of Parsons's ability to analyse conflict in society, epitomized by his views on National Socialism, still misses out on some important issues. One is that, visible even in the guise of the abstract formulations of The Social System, he not only used National Socialism as a subject of historical reference, but also developed a sociology of National Socialism in the 1940s. In it, systems theory addressed the practical problems of the day and attempted to contribute to their solutions by means of social-science analysis. An article published in 1945 was an obvious occasion where he made visible how his sociology of Nazism could contribute to a policy programme for the post-war democratization of Germany. That this involved economic integration of Europe as a most desirable strategy he explained in a number of memoranda written in 1945 for a government agency. These have not been analysed hitherto. In this context of economic planning for peace he devised some cogent suggestions that are strikingly similar to the ideas which subsequently inspired the Marshall Plan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many countries have implemented youth (un)employment programmes for low-achieving young people to improve their employment prospects. In Germany, these youths are often channelled into prevocational programmes to prevent them from long-term 'scars' by providing a 'second chance' to enter apprenticeships (serving as entry into the labour market in Germany). However, the usefulness of these programmes is contested. It remains unclear whether it is (more) useful for young people to invest in education and improve formal qualifications (to send a positive 'signal') or to spend more time in firms (e.g. to counteract possible discrimination processes or to generate new network ties). It is also unclear who benefits most depending on previous school-leaving certificates. We address these questions by using rich data from the German National Educational Panel Study and apply entropy balancing as a matching approach to control for selection. We find that both attaining a higher school certificate and spending time in firms improve low-achieving youth's chances to enter apprenticeships. However, only those who attained a higher-level school certificate are able to enter higher-status training occupations afterwards. Moreover, prevocational programmes are most beneficial for the most disadvantaged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the increase in dual-earner couples in Germany over recent decades, starting a family still often leads to a (re-)traditionalization of the division of labour in partnerships, with considerable gender differences in working hours and family obligations remaining. Consequently, after a child is born especially women face the challenge of reconciling career and family. Against this backdrop, a growing proportion of firms has started to create family-friendly working conditions to relieve the burden on their (female) employees. In the course of doing so, firms have also increasingly invested in organizational family-friendly arrangements in recent years. In this article, we analyse the effects of these arrangements on employees' behaviour by using German-linked employer–employee data. We ask how specific organizational family-friendly measures affect a crucial point in women's careers: the employment interruption after childbirth. Based on time-specific piecewise constant models, our results reveal that organizational family-friendly measures positively influence women's return to the labour market after childbirth and thus result in benefits for both firms and employees. Furthermore, we find that the effects of the measures are determined by the structural context and are not time constant but vary according to the age of the child. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the Refugee Convention and European asylum legislation state that decisions regarding asylum applications should be determined solely based on persecution and other human rights violations, the outcomes of asylum procedures may be subject to socioeconomic selectivity. This article is the first to analyse whether the human and social capital of asylum-seekers affect the results of decisions regarding their asylum applications and the length of asylum procedures based on a comprehensive longitudinal survey of 5,300 refugees in Germany. We find that socioeconomic and social capital resources increase the probability of approval of asylum applications and reduce the length of asylum procedures. Moreover, human capital is particularly rewarding for asylum-seekers from countries subject to severe political and civil rights violations, whereas social networks are more conducive when the case for protection is rather difficult to prove. Finally, asylum-seekers with a higher socioeconomic status before migration seem to be better positioned to efficiently instrumentalize social networks during the asylum process. Throughout the analysis, we control for variables that capture the violation of human rights and other forms of violence, changes in asylum policies and country-of-origin-specific fixed effects. The results are robust to different specifications and are representative for asylum-seekers arriving in Germany between 2013 and 2016. Altogether, similar to other claim-making processes, the asylum process seems to promote social inequality due to socioeconomic and social capital resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I study the role that threatening events play in shaping both the occurrence and the distribution of intergroup conflict. Using the case of anti-refugee attacks in Germany, the study finds that the 2015 New Year's Eve (NYE) sexual assaults led to a dramatic surge in the daily rate of violence, far surpassing the more short-lived effect of domestic and European terrorist attacks. Importantly, this effect was more pronounced among districts with low prior levels of anti-refugee hostility and far-right support. The NYE event both increased the frequency and changed the distribution of subsequent attacks—mobilizing new, previously peaceful communities to behave aggressively towards local refugee populations. Together, these findings reveal that threatening events not only affect the amount of intergroup conflict, but may also alter the structural conditions under which such conflict emerges in the first place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the consequences of starting in overeducation often focuses on either secondary or tertiary graduates. We focus on both within one country, Germany. While matching and search models imply the improvement of initial overeducation, human capital theory and stigma associated with overeducation predict entrapment. The strongly skill- and occupation-based labour market for the vocationally trained in Germany mitigates the bridge function of overeducation. As the less standardized tertiary system creates more uncertainties, initial overeducation should be more prevalent and should serve as a bridge to better positions. However, depreciation of human capital and the stigma associated with overeducation oppose the bridge function of overeducation here, too. Using data from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), we compare labour market positions of career starters in overeducation with those not in overeducation in subsequent years using propensity score matching. In the fifth year after labour market entrance, the differences in overeducation between initially overeducated and non-overeducated individuals amounts to 38 percentage points for graduates and 28 for vocationally trained persons. In addition, vocationally trained persons starting in overeducation face higher unemployment risks later on. Our findings challenge the assumption of a bridge function in both educational groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on data that tracks curriculum vitae (CV) and publication records as well as survey information from sociologists in German academia, we examine the effects of parenthood on the publication output of male and female academics that were present in German universities or research institutes in the year 2013. Results indicate that having children leads to a significant decline in the number of publications by women on average, while not affecting the number of publications by men. However, the gendered effect of children on productivity hardly mitigates differences in publication output between men and women, as women still publish about 20 per cent less than men after controlling for the adverse effects of children on productivity. The gendered effect of childbearing depends partly on prior levels of women's academic achievements, suggesting a mechanism of performance-driven self-selection. Lower-performing women tend to suffer a stronger motherhood penalty than better performing women, while the publication output of successful women (who have been granted academic awards) is not reduced through childbirth. The results indicate that women are better at managing the 'double burden' of kids and career if external, award-giving committees have bestowed prestige upon them or indicated their potential for a scientific career. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the relation of gender wage inequality to occupational licensing in Germany in 1993 and 2015. We show that the very particular German licensing system and strong gender segregation lead to an overrepresentation of women in licensed occupations. We further investigate, whether both genders benefit equally from licensing in terms of wages. Finally, we study whether both women's overrepresentation and potential gender gaps within licensed occupations help to explain patterns in the overall gender wage gap. To this end, we distinguish licensed occupations in professions and semi-professions. We use 1993 and 2015 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel Study to apply repeated cross-sectional regressions and decompositions. Our findings suggest that women benefited more from licensing in 1993 than in 2015. Men's wage premiums seem to increase over time, but women's premiums do not. We also show that semi-professions are less rewarding and women are overrepresented in these occupations. Finally, increased demand for licensed occupations is an important contribution to narrowing the gender wage gap. Women's increased employment in licensed occupations alone would have reduced the overall gender wage gap by roughly 8 per cent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the impact of parental unemployment and regional labour market conditions on the probability of a successful transition from non-academic secondary schooling to vocational training in Germany, using data from the National Educational Panel Study and multilevel logistic regression models. Although widely regarded as a low-cost, low-risk and high-gain vocational path, we nevertheless find a clear negative effect of parental unemployment on adolescents' chances of entering an apprenticeship contract. We test for poorer school performance, reduced household income, reduced self-esteem and limited access to labour market information as potential mediators of the effect, and only find support for some limited impact of economic deprivation. However, we also show that in families where one parent has experienced unemployment shortly before the child's own transition from secondary schooling, students' chances of a successful transition depend much more strongly on regional labour market conditions than in families without parental experiences of unemployment. Even in a regulated transition system like Germany's, adverse labour market conditions thus reinforce the intergenerational disadvantages induced by parental unemployment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A central argument for the deregulation of employment contracts is that fixed-term contracts boost employment of jobseekers with uncertain productivity by giving employers a tool to screen such applicants over a longer period of time before permanent hire. We test this proposition by comparing the risk of entering fixed-term employment for individually laid-off workers with that for individuals who have left their previous job for other reasons. This strategy is based on the assumption that in the German context individual lay-offs create uncertainty about jobseekers' productivity. We use data on work exits and subsequent labour market re-entry of the prime-age workforce in Germany from waves 2000-2013 of the Socio-Economic Panel. Our results show that the risk of fixed-term employment is substantively smaller after voluntary job exits but reveal only a small and statistically insignificant risk difference between individual lay-offs and workplace closures after adjusting for differences in socio-economic background and characteristics of the previous job. These findings challenge the view that employers use fixed-term contracts as an instrument to screen specific groups of workers whose productivity is highly uncertain, at least with regard to recent career disruptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Socio-economically disadvantaged and ethnic minorities are affected by a disproportionately high exposure to environmental pollution. Yet, it is unclear if selective migration causes this disproportionate exposure experienced by low-income and minority households. The study uses longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to investigate the process of selective migration and its connection to the perceived exposure to air pollution in Germany. Consistent with the selective migration argument, movers experience a decrease in exposure according to their income, while stationary households do not experience a reductive effect due to income. Furthermore, the moving returns differ by minority status. While native German households experience less exposure to pollution when moving to a new place of residence, minority households do not. Additional analyses show that this minority effect cannot be explained by socio-economic differences, but completely vanishes in the second immigrant generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on an innovative design, combining a multi-factorial survey experiment with a longitudinal perspective, we examine changes in the public acceptance of immigrants in Germany from the beginning of the so-called 'migration crisis' to after the sexual assaults of New Year's Eve (NYE) 2015/2016. In contrast to previous studies investigating similar research questions, our approach allows to differentiate changes along various immigrant characteristics. Derived from discussions making up the German immigration discourse during this time, we expect reduced acceptance especially of those immigrants who were explicitly connected to the salient events, like Muslims and the offenders of NYE. Most strikingly, we find that refugees were generally highly accepted and even more so in the second wave, whereas the acceptance of immigrants from Arab or African countries further decreased. Moreover, female respondents' initial preference for male immigrants disappeared. Contrary to our expectations, we find no changes in the acceptance of Muslims. We conclude that (i) public opinion research is well advised to match the particular political and social context under investigation to a fitting outcome variable to adequately capture the dynamics of anti-immigrant sentiment and that (ii) the vividly discussed upper limits for refugees seem to be contrary to public demands according to our data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an ongoing debate in the field of social mobility research about whether intergenerational social mobility can be increased by way of education policy. However, evidence on the effects of specific education policies on social mobility continues to be scarce. This article analyses the effect of one specific policy reform, the extension of compulsory schooling in Germany, which has been argued to have led to a decrease in educational inequality and an increase in social mobility. Using a difference-in-difference design, the article exploits the variation in the timing of the reform across German states to estimate the reform effect on the educational attainment and labour market chances of individuals from different social class backgrounds. We find that the reform resulted in a substantial narrowing of the gap in educational attainment between different social origin groups. This decline in educational inequality further translated into a reduction in the inequality in labour market chances between people from different social class backgrounds, thus increasing intergenerational social mobility. Our findings suggest that educational policy can lead to substantial increases in intergenerational social mobility, which may have been overlooked in past research on societal-level, long-run trends in social mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates whether increased availability of low-cost, state-subsidized childcare for under 3-year-olds in Germany is associated with shorter employment interruptions amongst mothers. By focusing on a major childcare reform in East and West Germany, we examine the effect in two contexts that differ markedly in the acceptance and use of formal childcare and maternal employment. We combine rich longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (2006-2014) with annual administrative county-level data on the availability of low-cost, state-subsidized childcare, estimating event history models. The results indicate that increased childcare availability for under 3-year-olds reduces mothers' employment interruptions, particularly after a second childbirth, and increases the probability of returning to part-time or full-time employment as opposed to marginal employment. Furthermore, increased availability of low-cost, state-subsidized childcare increases mothers' likelihood of returning to employment in the second year after childbirth, when paid leave entitlements expire and the availability of childcare becomes important. However, our results are only statistically significant for West German mothers and only after the birth of a second child. The study extends the literature on women's return-to-work behaviour by providing evidence on the medium-term impact of family policy on the duration of mothers' employment interruptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often shown that temporary employees generally perceive their job insecurity to be higher than permanent employees. However, substantial variations in this perceived job security gap exist between countries. This article engages with this knowledge and adds to it by focusing on these country variations and asking what role the strength of employment protection legislation (EPL) has both on the size of the job security gap and in explaining country differences. The developed hypotheses suggest that the two components of EPL--job security provisions, indicating the 'protection gap' between permanent and temporary employees as well as specific regulations on the use of temporary contracts--will increase the job security gap. These hypotheses are tested using data from the European Social Survey for 2004 and 2010 and data on employment regulations from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Compared to existing studies, this article offers a more detailed look at the operationalization of job security provisions and regulations on temporary employment--proposing an alternative measurement which is more closely related to the theoretical arguments. By using this more elaborate operationalization, the multilevel model shows that the gap in perceived job security between temporary and permanent employees systematically increases with respect to the two components of EPL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary Western Europe, both scholars and the public discuss the consequences of a rising share of a comparatively religious Muslim population for societal coexistence. Yet we know surprisingly little about how religion and religiosity shape social relationships. Focusing on adolescents' friendship networks, we examine how religion and religiosity affect intra- and inter-group friendship choices. While youth should generally prefer to befriend peers of the same religion, this religious homophily should be more pronounced for highly than for less religious youth. Against the background of rising anti-Muslim attitudes in Europe, Christian and non-religious youth further may be particularly hesitant to befriend Muslim peers, and especially highly religious ones. We analysed three waves of German longitudinal friendship network data from ethnically diverse schools. Regarding intra-group friendships, while Muslim youth indeed preferred to befriend Muslim peers, Christian youth displayed no evidence of religious homophily. For Muslims, higher levels of religiosity further increased this preference. Regarding inter-group friendships, irrespective of their individual religiosity, Muslim youth were socially divided from their non-Muslim peers, as both Christian and nonreligious youth were reluctant to befriend Muslim peers. In sum, in the German context, religion itself rather than religiosity seems to matter most for adolescents' friendship choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates how demographic trends influenced households' abilities to compensate for low or lacking earnings among their members. I focus on the probability that household earnings excluding those of the respondent are above the poverty threshold. The share of households where this is the case declined sharply between 1993-1996 and 2009-2012, implying a deterioration of households' potential to hedge labour market risks. The growing importance of single-adult households partly explains the decline, but the negative trend is also found for women living with a partner. Increased female labour force participation counterbalances the general trend for men in couple households. A comparison by individual economic status shows that the availability of earnings from other household members decreases more for persons with lower educational levels and the unemployed. Contrary to expectations, the uneven development of the share of single adults between social strata and the increasing correlation of spouses' employment status explain only part of this increasing spread of household resources. Overall, the results underline the importance of changes in household resources for the increase in poverty in Germany overall, as well as for growing disparities between poverty risks by individual employment status and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]