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SOEPpapers 1224 / 2025
This paper employs a panel event study design to examine the causal effects of the 2013 flood disaster in East Germany on subjective well-being. We merge geo-spatial flood data with longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) to identify individuals in affected municipalities. Our results show that those affected by the flood report a significant life satisfaction drop of 0.17 points ...
2025| Sachintha Fernando, Katharina Kolb, Christoph Wunder
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SOEPpapers 1223 / 2025
In this study, we contribute to the literature about the effects of improving access to citizenship on integration outcomes. Hereby, we exploit exogenous variation from two citizenship reforms in Germany to estimate the effects of residency requirements on perceived discrimination, which is strongly linked to individual well-being, sense of belonging, and migration desires and decisions. We find that ...
2025| Adriana Rocío Cardozo Silva, Christopher Prömel
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SOEPpapers 1222 / 2025
We investigate social disparities in digital skills, focusing on both actual proficiency levels and confidence in these skills. Drawing on a representative sample from Germany, we first demonstrate that both dimensions strongly predict labor market success. We then use this sample to identify gender and socioeconomic disparities in levels and confidence. Finally, using a long-run RCT panel framework ...
2025| Fabian Kosse, Tim Leffler, Arna Woemmel
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SOEPpapers 1221 / 2025
How do students’ earnings expectations differ by being the first in their family to attend university (FiF) and how do they affect field of study choice? We leverage unique survey and administrative data to document sizable gaps in expected earnings between FiF and non-FiF students. Our data can explain two-thirds of this gap, with the largest share attributable to field of study choice. We show that ...
2025| Katharina Adler, Fabian Kosse, Markus Nagler, Johannes Rincke
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SOEPpapers 1220 / 2025
The transition to parenthood is a critical period that exacerbates gendered economic inequality, with mothers more likely than their partners to experience employment disruptions and income losses. This study examines individual poverty risk among partnered indivduals (N=1,237) in Germany from a life course perspective, analyzing how gendered career patterns around first births between 1992 and 2013 ...
2025| Christina Siegert
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SOEPpapers 1219 / 2025
This study investigates the impact of child-related absence from work on the income of working mothers and fathers, addressing a significant research gap in sociology and labour economics. While previous research has established that gender and parenthood significantly influence income levels, the consequences of caring for a sick child—a common and unpredictable responsibility—remain inadequately ...
2025| Ayhan Adams, Katrin Golsch
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SOEPpapers 1218 / 2025
Mit den Daten des Sozio-oekonomischen Panels (SOEP) 2016 ist erstmalig und einmalig eine Überprüfung der Vergleichbarkeit der ein- und zweistufigen Messmethode des Effort-Reward-Imbalance Modells im Sozio-oekonomischen Panel möglich. Methodik: Die Reliabilität wird mit deskriptiven Statistiken, Inter-Item-Korrelation und Item-Skala Statistiken überprüft. Die Konstrukt- und Kriteriumsvalidität wird ...
2025| Mandy Müller
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SOEPpapers 1217 / 2025
Men at the bottom quintile of the German male earnings distribution had lower average earnings in 2019 than in 2001. In contrast, female earnings have increased throughout the distribution. What explains these diverging trends and how did they translate into changes in net income? Data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) reveal that the drop in bottom male earnings is mostly due to a decrease in work ...
2025| Eliana Coschignano, Robin Jessen
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SOEPpapers 1216 / 2024
This field experiment investigates the causal impact of mothers’ perceptions of gender norms on their employment attitudes and labor-supply expectations. We provide mothers of young children in Germany with information about the prevailing gender norm regarding maternal employment in their city. At baseline, over 70% of mothers incorrectly perceive this gender norm as too conservative. Our randomized ...
2024| Henning Hermes, Marina Krauß, Philipp Lergetporer, Frauke Peter, Simon Wiederhold
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SOEPpapers 1215 / 2024
Empirical evidence suggests that the majority of immigrants who initially planned a temporary stay end up staying permanently in the host country. Since beliefs about the duration of stay are a strong determinant of integration, many long-term migrants may end up less than optimally integrated. We theoretically model migrants with potential misperceptions about their future utility and wage prospects ...
2024| Marc Kaufmann, Joël Machado, Bertrand Verheyden
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SOEPpapers 1214 / 2024
How does informal care affect caregivers’ well-being? Theories and existing research provide conflicting answers to this question, partly because the temporal processes and conditions under which different aspects of well-being are affected are unknown. Here, we used longitudinal data from Dutch, German, and Australian representative panels (281,884 observations, 28,663 caregivers) to examine theoretically ...
2024| Michael D. Krämer, Wiebke Bleidorn
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SOEPpapers 1213 / 2024
We study the mating patterns of non-heterosexual individuals, who represent a significant and increasing portion of the population, particularly among the youth. We estimate a multidimensional matching model of the marriage market where partner’s gender is endogenously chosen conditional on the agent’s sexual orientation, and is subject to trade-offs that depend on both the agents’ preferences and ...
2024| Edoardo Ciscato, Marion Goussé
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SOEPpapers 1212 / 2024
There is growing interest in understanding how gender influences the accumulation of wealth. While prior studies focused on labor-related determinants, our research focuses on inheritances and gifts. Using unique survey data that oversamples the top 1% of wealth holders in Germany, we show that the gender wealth gap is small for individuals up to age 40, then widens, and declines for those past retirement ...
2024| Charlotte Bartels, Eva Sierminska, Carsten Schröder
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SOEPpapers 1211 / 2024
In this project, we analyze whether the arts can mitigate negative impacts of social distancing and isolation on mental health and wellbeing, ease the burden of closed day-care and school facilities on families, and preserve attitudes of solidarity and trust. Using the SOEP-CoV questionnaire, we examine whether experience with music enabled individuals and households to handle social isolation and ...
2024| Martina Metzger, Hans Walter Steinhauer, Jennifer Pédussel Wu
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SOEPpapers 1210 / 2024
This study investigates how actual and anticipated intergenerational wealth transfers (i.e., inter-vivo gifts and inheritances) contribute to social stratification in the transition to homeownership. Utilizing discrete-time survival analysis on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (N=13,018), we find that individuals whose parents were manual workers or service workers are less likely to ...
2024| Jascha Dräger, Nora Müller, Klaus Pforr
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SOEPpapers 1209 / 2024
Since the new millennium, research in the field of personality development has focused on the stability and change of basic personality traits. Motivational aspects of personality and their longitudinal association with basic traits have received comparably little attention. In this preregistered study, we applied bivariate latent growth curve modeling to investigate the codevelopment of nine life ...
2024| Laura Buchinger, Theresa Entringer, David Richter, Gert G. Wagner, Denis Gerstorf, Wiebke Bleidorn
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SOEPpapers 1208 / 2024
This paper estimates the causal effect of increased availability of early childcare on maternal health. We focus on a substantial expansion of childcare for children under three years in West Germany from 2006 to 2019. By matching county-level childcare attendance rates with individual data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), we are able to quantify the effects of this expansion on maternal ...
2024| Marina Krauß, Niklas Rott
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SOEPpapers 1207 / 2024
We analyze if technological progress and the change in the occupational structure have improved women’s position in the labour market. We show that women increasingly work in non-routine manual and in interactive occupations. However, the observed narrowing of the gender wage gap is entirely driven by declining gender wag gaps within, rather than between, occupations. A decomposition exercise reveals ...
2024| Ronald Bachmann, Myrielle Gonschor
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SOEPpapers 1206 / 2024
While there is an established positive relationship between self-control and education, the direction of causality remains a matter of debate. We make a contribution to resolving this issue by exploiting a series of Australian and German educational reforms that increased minimum education requirements as a source of exogenous variation in education levels. Instrumental variables estimates suggest ...
2024| Deborah A. Cobb-Clark, Sarah C. Dahmann, Daniel A. Kamhöfer, Hannah Schildberg-Hörisch
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SOEPpapers 1205 / 2024
The debate on the effects of child care policies on household and individual behavior is substantial but lacks a discussion of the unintended consequences of rising wages in the child care work sector. To address this gap in the debate, the relation between rising pay and formal child care hours, informal child care hours, and employment hours is analyzed empirically with a case study on child care ...
2024| Verena Löffler