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The Australian Government launched the My School website in 2010 to provide standardised information about the quality of schools to the Australian public. This paper combines data from this website with home sales data for the state of Victoria to estimate the effect of the publication of school quality information on property prices. We use a difference-in-difference approach to estimate the causal effect of the release of information about high-quality and low-quality schools relative to mediumquality schools in the neighborhood and find that the release of information about high-quality schools increases property prices by 3.6 percent, whereas the release of information about low-quality schools has no significant effect. The findings indicate that many buyers are unaware of the relevance of school quality information and that real estate agents pursue a strategy of disclosing information about high-quality schools to increase the sales price. Results from a survey of Victorian real estate agents provide evidence in favor of this strategy. In 2010 startete die australische Regierung die My School website, um der australischen Öffentlichkeit standardisierte Informationen über die Qualität von Schulen zu liefern. Dieses Papier kombiniert Daten von dieser website mit Daten zum Verkauf von Wohneigentum in Victoria, um den Effekt der Veröffentlichung von Informationen über die Schulqualität auf Preise von Wohneigentum zu schätzen. Wir verwenden einen Differenzen-in-Differenzen-Ansatz, um den kausalen Effekt der Veröffentlichung von Informationen über Schulen mit hoher bzw. niedriger Qualität (im Vergleich zu mittlerer Qualität) zu ermitteln und finden dass die Veröffentlichung von Informationen über qualitativ hochwertige Schulen den Preis von Wohneigentum um 3,6 Prozent erhöht, während die Veröffentlichung von Informationen über qualitativ minderwertige Schulen keinen signifikanten Effekt hat. Die Ergebnisse weisen darauf hin, dass viele Käufer nicht wissen, dass Informationen über die Schulqualität relevant sind, und dass Makler die Strategie verfolgen, ausschliesslich Informationen über qualitativ hochwertige Schulen zu offenbaren, um den Verkaufspreis zu erhöhen. Ergebnisse einer Umfrage von Maklern bestätigen, dass Makler diese Strategie tatsächlich verfolgen.

Using data from the SOEP, we analyze the wellbeing impact of underemployment through overeducation to examine a broader definition of employment loss. Persons leaving a job through exogenous reasons but entering directly into immediate employment may not find a perfect employment match and cannot use their skills fully in the new job. We demonstrate that a 'downchange', although welfare reducing, may be more desirable than suffering the large welfare losses associated with unemployment whilst searching for a more suitable job match. Nonetheless, underemployed persons do not enter into the official job statistics, whilst their welfare loss due to 'downchange' is approximately 50% of the welfare loss of entry into unemployment.

This study focuses on the long term eff ects of unemployment on subjective wellbeing in a family context for 17-24 year old sons living with at least one parent, using data from the German SOEP. As fathers enter unemployment, sons' subjective wellbeing is not only reduced immediately, but also 5 years into the future. As this future reduction remains unexpected by the sons, this suggests even higher true costs of unemployment than previously thought. Diese Studie untersucht die Langzeiteffekte von väterlicher Arbeitslosigkeit auf die Lebenszufriedenheit des Sohnes. Mit Hilfe von Daten des Sozio-Ökonomischen Panels (SOEP) werden generationsübergreifende Effekte auf 17-24 Jahre alte Söhne, die mit mindestens einem Elternteil zusammenleben, untersucht. Wird der Vater arbeitslos hat dies sowohl kurzfristige als auch langfristige negative Effekte. Noch fünf Jahre später können negative Effekte auf die Lebenszufriedenheit des Sohnes identifiziert werden. Dieser langfristige negative Effekt wird von den Söhnen nicht antizipiert. Demnach sind die wahren Kosten der Arbeitslosigkeit höher als bisher gedacht.

This paper outlines a panel data retrieval program written for Stata/SE 10 or better, which allows easier accessing of complex panel data sets. Using a drop-down menu and mouse click system, the researcher selects variables from any and all available years of a panel study. The data is automatically retrieved and merged to form a "long file", which can be directly used by the Stata panel estimators. The system implements modular data cleaning programs called "plugins". Yearly updates to the data retrievals can be made automatically. Projects can be stored in libraries allowing modular administration and appending. The paper exemplifies the power of PanelWhiz using the example of the German SOEP (German Socio-Economic Panel Study).

Of the many labour market Hartz IV reforms that have been implemented in Germany since 2005, the role of short-term unemployment insurance has not received much attention. In this paper we examine distributional effects of labour earnings and unemployment benefits using simulated increases in unemployment insurance replacement rates or equivalently, increases in the net present value of benefit duration. Starting around an 18%-point increase in the replacement rate, there are significant negative labour supply effects, drawing those employed into unemployment shifting the mass of the earnings distribution to the left. At around a 25%-point increase in the replacement rate, the mass of the distribution shifts right again, as those receiving unemployment benefits simply enjoy an increased transfer. Thus, due to the substantial negative labour supply effects, German economic policy should avoid potentially increasing the UI benefit replacement rate (or equivalently, increasing the benefit duration) in the near future as a response to the worldwide economic crisis.

This paper examines the impact of unemployment on life satisfaction for Germany 1984-2006, using a sample of men and women from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Across the board we find large significant negative effects for unemployment on life satisfaction. This paper expands on previous cornerstone research from Winkelmann and Winkelmann (1998) and explicitly identifies truly exogenous unemployment entries starting from 1991. We find that for women in East and West Germany, company closures in the year of entry into unemployment produce strongly negative effects on life satisfaction over and above an overall effect of unemployment, providing prima facie evidence of a reduced outside work option, large investments in firm-specific human capital or a family constraint. The compensating variation in terms of income is dramatic, indicating enormous non-pecuniary negative effects of exogenous unemployment due to company closures.

The level of violence in the National Hockey League (NHL) reached its highest point in 1987 and has reduced somewhat since then, although to levels much larger than before the first team expansions in 1967. Using publicly available information from several databases 1996-2007, the incentives for violence in North American ice hockey are analyzed. We examine the role of penalty minutes and more specifically, fighting, during the regular season in determining wages for professional hockey players and team-level success indicators. There are substantial returns paid not only to goal scoring skills but also to fighting ability, helping teams move higher in the playoffs and showing up as positive wage premia for otherwise observed low-skill wing players. These estimated per-fight premia, depending on fight success ($10,000 to $18,000), are even higher than those for an additional point made. By introducing a fight fine of twice the maximum potential gain ($36,000) and adding this amount to salaries paid for the team salary cap (fines would be 6.7% of the team salary cap or the average wage of 2 players), then all involved would have either little or no incentives to allow fighting to continue.

This paper aims at providing empirical evidence on social exclusion of immigrants in Germany. We demonstrate that when using a conventional definition of the social inclusion index typically applied in the literature, immigrants appear to experience a significant degree of social deprivation and exclusion, confirming much of the economic literature examining the economic assimilation of immigrants in Germany. We propose a weighting scheme that weights components of social inclusion by their subjective contribution to an overall measure of life satisfaction.Using this weighting scheme to calculate an index of social inclusion, we find that immigrants are in fact as "included" as Germans. This result is driven strongly by the disproportionately positive socio-demographic characteristics that immigrants possess as measured by the contribution to their life satisfaction.

Even though European labor markets are characterized by high average unemployment, there is a shortage of high-skilled labor, leading many European economists to argue for an immigration policy directed at actively recruiting highly qualified workers from abroad. It has further been argued that an immigration policy that is tailored to attract young and economically successful migrants can alleviate some of the demographic burden associated with an aging population.We embed this discussion into a systematic classification of economic migration research according to its major conceptual and applied questions. The state of theoretical and empirical research on the migration decision, the literature on the economic performance of immigrants and their economic impact is reviewed briefly, proceeding along the lines of a clear conceptual framework. In addition, the paper discusses expectations on future migration flows and the policy options of immigration countries for dealing with these flows.

We analyze the determinants of household work contracted in the German shadow economy. The German socio-economic household panel, which enumerates casual domestic employment, is used to estimate the demand for such household work. The regressors include regional wage rates, household income and several control variables for household composition. We find that the demand for household work in the shadow economy is very income elastic. This suggests that targeted wage subsidies, linked to household work agencies, would be very effective in raising the legal demand for domestic help. A wage subsidy of 50% of wage costs could thus establish up to 500,000 new jobs for previously unemployed or non-working low skilled workers. The net fiscal costs of such a scheme are about 6.200 Euro per full-time job. In addition, society benefits from more law enforcement and from a raised female labor supply, especially by highly qualified mothers.

We analyse the determinants of household work contracted in the German shadow economy. The German socio-economic household panel, which enumerates casual domestic employment, is used to estimate the demand for such household work. The regressors include regional wage rates, household income and several control variables for household composition. We find that the demand for household work in the shadow economy is very income elastic. This suggests that targeted wage subsidies, linked to household work agencies, would be very effective in raising the legal demand for domestic help. A wage subsidy of 50% of wage costs could thus establish up to 500,000 new jobs for previously unemployed or non-working low skilled workers. The net fiscal costs of such a scheme are about 6.200 euro per full-time job. In addition, society benefits from more law enforcement and from an increased female labour supply, especially of highly qualified mothers.

Using an innovative dataset for ICT use for five countries in Europe,we examine the impact and association of ICT on socio-economic exclusion.Using OLS regression we find significant wage premiums for PC and internet usage at the workplace.Following Dinardo/Fortin/Lemieux (1997),we examine the impact of ICT on the distribution of wages.We find that the risk of economic exclusion increases markedly for those not having ICT at the workplace,with the largest effects being found in Britain.To examine the impact of ICT on social exclusion,we create a multi-dimensional index of social exclusion,and also following DFL97,examine the change in the distribution of the exclusion index.Not being able to afford or knowing how to operate a home PC in Britain and Israel is associated with a large increase in the risk of social exclusion.

Gutachten im Auftrag des Ministeriums für Arbeit und Soziales, Qualifikation und Technologie des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, Bonn 2002 (81 Seiten)

In Deutschland haben Menschen ohne ausreichende Berufsqualifikationen ein besonders hohes Arbeitsplatzrisiko. Gleichzeitig werden einfache Dienstleistungen in Privathaushalten wie Putzen, Gartenarbeiten und kleine Reparaturen in Deutschland überwiegend durch Schwarzarbeit erledigt. Haushaltsnahe Dienste schaffen praktisch keine sozialversicherungspflichtigen Jobs. Eine Analyse auf Basis des vom DIW Berlin durchgeführten Sozio-oekonomischen Panels (SOEP) zeigt, dass die Nachfrage von Privathaushalten sehr sensibel auf Veränderungen im Preis von Dienstleistungen reagiert. Deshalb könnte eine Förderung von "Dienstleistungsagenturen" hohe Beschäftigungseffekte auslösen und einen nachhaltigen Beitrag zur Legalisierung von Schwarzarbeit leisten. In diesem Bericht wird die kürzlich von Rheinland-Pfalz vorgelegte Gesetzesinitiative bewertet, die darauf abzielt, durch Lohnkostenzuschüsse und die Einrichtung von Dienstleistungsagenturen den legalen Markt für Dienstleistungen in privaten Haushalten zu entwickeln. Die Analyse basiert auf einem Gutachten des Instituts zur Zukunft der Arbeit (IZA) sowie auf Berechnungen des DIW Berlin, mit denen die Auswirkungen der Gesetzesinitiative von Rheinland-Pfalz abgeschätzt werden.

In this paper we test the Rational Expectations hypothesis using longitudinal data on expectations and realizations of individual welfare for East Germans in the years following reunification. German reunification was unexpected and delivered a large shock to the future prospects of the inhabitants of the former East Germany. We therefore take it as a 'natural' experiment through which to study the rationality of expectations. Our results show that East Germans significantly over-estimated the welfare gains immediately following reunification. The prediction error was largest for the young, the poorly educated and those with children. However, expectations and realizations of life satisfaction in East Germany had converged by 1995, at a level considerably below that of West Germans. We hence conclude that expectations were close to rational after the dust of reunification had settled, but that expectations are not likely to be rational in times of great transition or volatility.

In this paper, we investigate the intergenerational transmission of smoking behavior from parents to their children using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, surveyed in 1999 including 813 youths aged 16 through 19. We find strong evidence, that parental smoking significantly increases the probability that their children likewise become smokers. Youths living in families with both parents smoking are 3.3 times more likely to smoke themselves, while a smoking father raises the probability by the factor 2.8 and a smoking mother by the factor 2.1. Further, we treat single-parent households separately and control for other socio-economic factors concerning the youths' smoking decision like household income, educational status and working status. Youths' leisure activities and personal attitudes are taken into consideration to test for determinants influencing youth smoking outside from the family context. Thus policies targeted at reducing juvenile smoking may fail, if parents' behavior is not taken into account.

We quantify the value of changes in life circumstances in Germany following reunification. To this end, we develop and implement a fixed-effect estimator for ordinal life satisfaction in the German Socio-Economic Panel. We find strong negative effects on life satisfaction from being recently fired, losing a spouse through either death or separation and time spent in hospital, whilst we find strong positive effects from income and marriage. Using a new causal decomposition technique, we find that East Germans experienced a continued improvement in life satisfaction after 1990 to which increased household incomes contributed around 12%. Most of the increase is explained by improved average circumstances, such as public services. For West Germans, we find virtually no change in satisfaction between 1991 and 1999.

We examine the dynamic role of education and experience as determinants of wages. It is hypothesized that an employee's education is an important signal to the employer initially. Over time, the returns to schooling should decrease with labour market experience and increase with initially unobserved ability, since the employer gradually obtains better information on the productivity of an employee. Replicating US studies using data from a large German panel data set (GSOEP), we find no evidence for the employer learning hypothesis for Germany. Differentiating blue-collar and white-collar workers and estimating quantile regressions, however, leads to the conclusion that employer learning takes place for blue-collar workers at the lower end of the wage distribution. We further show that information on the productivity of an employee is to a large extent private.

We examine the dynamic role of education and experience as determinants of wages. It is hypothesized that an employee's education is an important signal to the employer initially. Over time, the returns to schooling should decrease with labor market experience and increase with initially unobserved ability, since the employer gradually obtains better information on the productivity of an employee. Replicating US studies using data from a large German panel data set (GSOEP), we find no evidence for the employer learning hypothesis for Germany. Differentiating blue-collar and white-collar workers and estimating quantile regressions, however, leads to the conclusion that employer learning takes place for blue-collar workers at the lower end of the wage distribution. We further show, that information on the productivity of an employee is to a large extend private.

In this paper, the role of the computer at the workplace will be examined in determining the wage structure in Germany. Following Krueger (1993) and using the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), cross-sectional wage regression results from 1997 and panel results from 1984-1997 are presented. It is shown that the wage premium attributed to using a computer at work using cross-sectional results for 1997 is around 7%. Further it is shown that computer usage is very heterogeneous depending on which industry one works in. In cross-section, hypothesis tests show that several industries and almost all firm size categories exhibit very different wage differentials depending on computer usage at the workplace. As DiNardo/Pischke (1997) stress the need for panel data to control for unmeasured individual effects, we use GSOEP 1984-1997 panel data, where a random effects and fixed effects estimator were run in the wage estimation. We confirm the results that Entorf/Kramarz (1997) had for France, that in Germany the coefficient for computer usage at the workplace did NOT remain stable and although just barely significant, was reduced to mere 1% with individual fixed effects. We conclude that there are no computer usage wage differentials worth speaking of, once one controls adequately for unobserved individual heterogeneity. Aufbauend auf humankapital-theoretischen Überlegungen wird auf Basis der Individual-Daten des Sozio-oekonomischen Panels (SOEP) die Rolle der Nutzung von Computern am Arbeitsplatz als Determinante der Lohnstruktur in Deutschland untersucht. Bei Verwendung von Querschnittdaten ergibt sich für das Jahr 1997 ein signifikantes Lohndifferential zugunsten der PC-Nutzung von 7%. Um unbeobachtete Heterogenität zu kontrollieren, nutzen wir Fixed-Effects und Random-Effects-Panel-Schätzer. Im Ergebnis bleibt der Koeffizient der PC-Nutzung zwar noch schwach signifikant, reduziert sich aber auf nur noch 1%. Daraus schließen wir, daß es in Deutschland kein nennenswertes Lohndifferential der PC-Nutzung gibt, wenn man adäquat für unbeobachtete Heterogenität kontrolliert.

In this paper, the role of the computer at the workplace will be examined in determining the wage structure in Germany. Following Krueger (1993) and using the German Socio- Economic Panel (GSOEP), cross-sectional wage regression results from 1997 and panel results from 1984-1997 are presented. It is shown that the wage premium attributed to using a computer at work using cross-sectional results for 1997 is around 7%. Further it is shown that computer usage is very heterogeneous depending on which industry one works in. In cross-section, hypothesis tests show that several industries and almost all firm size categories exhibit very different wage differentials depending on computer usage at the workplace. As DiNardo and Pischke (1997) stress the need for panel data to control for unmeasured individual effects, we use GSOEP 1984-1997 panel data, where a random effects and fixed effects estimator were run in the wage estimation. We confirm the results that Entorf and Kramarz (1997) had for France, that in Germany the coefficient for computer usage at the workplace did not remain stable and although just barely significant, was reduced to mere 1% with individual fixed effects. We conclude that there are no computer usage wage differentials worth speaking of, once one controls adequately for unobserved individual heterogeneity.