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SOEPpapers 1195 / 2023
We describe the joint permanent health distribution of parents and children in Germany using 25 years of data from the Socio-Economic Panel. We derive three main results: First, a ten percentile increase in parental permanent health is associated with a 2.3 percentile increase in their child’s health. Second, employing our anchoring method, we find that a percentile point increase in permanent health ...
2023| Daniel Graeber
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SOEPpapers 1194 / 2023
This study explores the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) and workers’ well-being and mental health using longitudinal survey data from Germany (2000-2020). We construct a measure of individual exposure to AI technology based on the occupation in which workers in our sample were first employed and explore an event study design and a difference-in-differences approach to compare AI-exposed ...
2023| Osea Giuntella, Johannes König, Luca Stella
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SOEPpapers 1193 / 2023
While inequality of opportunity (IOp) in earnings is well studied, the literature on IOp in individual net wealth is scarce to non-existent. This is problematic because both theoretical and empirical evidence show that the position in the wealth and income distribution can significantly diverge. We measure ex-ante IOp in net wealth for Germany using data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Ex-ante ...
2023| Daniel Graeber, Viola Hilbert, Johannes König
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SOEPpapers 1192 / 2023
This paper investigates the causal effect of education on life satisfaction, exploring effect heterogeneity along employment status. We use exogenous variation in compulsory schooling requirements and the build-up of new, academically more demanding schools, shifting educational attainment along the entire distribution of schooling. Leveraging plant closures and longitudinal information, ...
2023| Alexander Bertermann, Daniel A. Kamhöfer, Hannah Schildberg-Hörisch
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SOEPpapers 1191 / 2023
How does personality change when people get older? Numerous studies have investigated this question, overall supporting the idea of so-called personality maturation. However, heterogeneous findings have left open questions, such as whether maturation continues in old age and how large the effects are. We suggest that the heterogeneity is partly rooted in methodological issues. First, studies may have ...
2023| Ingo S. Seifert, Julia M. Rohrer, Stefan C. Schmukle
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SOEPpapers 1190 / 2023
Job levels summarize the complexity, autonomy, and responsibility of task execution. Conceptually, job levels are related to the organization of production, are distinct from occupations, and can be constructed from data on task execution. We highlight their empirical role in matched employer-employee data for life-cycle wage dynamics, refine a task-based view of wage determination, and demonstrate ...
2023| Christian Bayer, Moritz Kuhn
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SOEPpapers 1189 / 2023
In this paper we analyse the association between maternal well-being and child development at different ages. We use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) which captures maternal life satisfaction and numerous cognitive and non-cognitive child development outcomes. We identify a strong positive association between mothers’ life satisfaction and their children’s development when these ...
2023| Nabanita Datta Gupta, Jonas Jessen, C. Katharina Spiess
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SOEPpapers 1188 / 2023
This paper studies whether individuals that experienced parental unemployment during their childhood/early adolescence have poorer health once they reach the adulthood. We used data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 2002 until 2018. Our identiï¬cation strategy of the causal effect of parental unemployment relied on plant closures as exogenous variation of the individual labor market condition. ...
2023| Michele Ubaldi, Matteo Picchio
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SOEPpapers 1187 / 2023
To determine how wives’ and husbands’ retirement options affect their spouses’ (and their own) labour supply decisions, we exploit (early) retirement cutoffs by way of a regression discontinuity design. Several German pension reforms since the early 1990s have gradually raised women’s retirement age from 60 to 65, but also increased ages for several early retirement pathways affecting both sexes. We ...
2023| Hamed Markazi Moghadam, Patrick A. Puhani, Joanna Tyrowicz
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SOEPpapers 1186 / 2023
What is the impact of housing upgrades on occupant health? Although economists and policymakers are certain about the health implications of housing upgrades, empirical evidence is largely missing or else only based on small-scale experiments in developing countries. This study provides the first population-representative quasi-experimental estimates based on a large-scale refurbishment program that ...
2023| Steffen Künn, Juan Palacios
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SOEPpapers 1185 / 2023
Our paper analyzes the role of public employment agencies in job matching, in particular the effects of the restructuring of the Federal Employment Agency in Germany (Hartz III labor market reform) for aggregate matching and unemployment. Based on two microeconomic datasets, we show that the market share of the Federal Employment Agency as job intermediary declined after the Hartz reforms. We ...
2023| Christian Merkl, Timo Sauerbier
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SOEPpapers 1184 / 2023
Sociological research is increasingly using panel data to examine changes in diverse outcomes over life course events. Most of these studies have one striking similarity: they analyse changes between yearly time intervals. In this paper, we present a simple but effective method to model such trajectories more precisely using available data. The approach exploits month-specific information regarding ...
2023| Ansgar Hudde, Marita Jacob
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SOEPpapers 1183 / 2023
A commonly expressed concern about immigration is that it undermines social cohesion in the receiving country. In this paper, we study the impact of a large and sudden inflow of asylum seekers on several indicators of social cohesion. In 2015/16, over one million asylum seekers from Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere arrived in Germany. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this inflow changed ...
2023| Emanuele Albarosa, Benjamin Elsner
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SOEPpapers 1182 / 2023
Redistribution and the welfare state have been linked by academic discourse to narratives that portray specific societal groups as ‘deserving’ or ‘undeserving’. The present analysis contributes to this scholarship in a twofold manner. First, it provides a holistic view on the beneficiaries and benefactors of welfare and asks how the public perception of the rich and the poor drives redistributive preferences. ...
2023| Matthias Diermeier, Madeleine L. Fischer, Judith Niehues
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SOEPpapers 1181 / 2023
Return migration intentions are complex and are not necessarily followed by future return migration. Our study compares successful return or repeated migration with self-declared return intentions. We take advantage of the latest German Socio-Economic Panel survey dropout studies and fieldwork to observe a wider return migration window than reported in the literature to answer the question of whether ...
2023| Hend Sallam
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SOEPpapers 1180 / 2023
Using representative data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), this paper finds a statistically significant union wage premium in Germany of almost three percent which is not simply a collective bargaining premium. Given that the union membership fee is typically about one percent of workers’ gross wages, this finding suggests that it pays off to be a union member. Our results show that the ...
2023| Marina Bonaccolto-Töpfer, Claus Schnabel
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SOEPpapers 1179 / 2022
This paper investigates the effects of the introduction of a statutory minimum wage in Germany on the wages and employment of migrants. Migrants are an overrepresented group in the low-wage sector and can be expected to particularly benefit from a minimum wage. We combine a “differential trend adjusted difference-in-differences estimator” (DTADD) and descriptive evidence to evaluate the impact of the ...
2022| Kai Ingwersen, Stephan L. Thomsen
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SOEPpapers 1178 / 2022
We analyse a measure of loneliness from a representative sample of German individuals interviewed in both 2017 and at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Both men and women felt lonelier during the COVID-19 pandemic than they did in 2017. The pandemic more than doubled the gender loneliness gap: women were lonelier than men in 2017, and the 2017-2020 rise in loneliness was far larger for ...
2022| Anthony Lepinteur, Andrew E. Clark, Ada Ferrer-i-Carbonell, Alan Piper, Carsten Schröder, Conchita D'Ambrosio
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SOEPpapers 1177 / 2022
We propose that false beliefs about the own current economic status are an important factor for explaining populist attitudes. Along with the subjects' receptiveness to right-wing populism, we elicit their perceived relative income positions in a representative survey of German households. We find that people with pessimistic beliefs about their income position are more attuned to populist statements. ...
2022| Thilo N. H. Albers, Felix Kersting, Fabian Kosse
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SOEPpapers 1176 / 2022
This paper exploits the idiosyncratic line of contact separating Allied and Soviet troops within East Germany at the end of WWII to study political resistance in a non-democracy. When Nazi Germany surrendered, 40% of what would become the authoritarian German Democratic Republic was initially under Allied control but was ceded to Soviet control less than two months later. Brief Allied exposure increased ...
2022| Luis R. Martinez, Jonas Jessen, Guo Xu