DIW Berlin: SOEPpapers

SOEPpapers 1146 / 2021

Buying Control? 'Locus of Control' and the Uptake of Supplementary Health Insurance

This paper analyses the relationship between locus of control (LOC) and the demand for supplementary health insurance. Drawing on longitudinal data from Germany, we find robust evidence that individuals having an internal LOC are more likely to take up supplementary private health insurance (SUPP). The increase in the probability to have a SUPP due to one standard deviation increase in the measure ...

2021| Eric Bonsang, Joan Costa-Font, Sonja DeNew

SOEPpapers 1145 / 2021

Worrying about Work? Disentangling the Relationship between Economic Insecurity and Mental Health

Literature encompassing economic insecurity and its relationship with mental health has increased significantly in recent years. While the association of job insecurity and mental health has been researched extensively, less is known about the general relationship between economic insecurity and mental health. This paper analyses the simultaneous influence of six different economic insecurity indicators ...

2021| Paul Fiedler

SOEPpapers 1144 / 2021

Sophistication about Self-Control

We propose a broadly applicable empirical approach to classify individuals as time-consistent versus native or sophisticated regarding their self-control limitations. Operationalizing our approach based on nationally representative data reveals that self-control problems are pervasive and that most people are at least partly aware of their limited self-control. Compared to naifs, sophisticates have ...

2021| Deborah A. Cobb-Clark, Sarah C. Dahmann, Daniel A. Kamhöfer, Hannah Schildberg-Hörisch

SOEPpapers 1143 / 2021

Causality in the Link between Income and Satisfaction: IV Estimation with Internal Instruments

Usually, it is expected that income increases life satisfaction. In recent years tough, research emerged that shows how subjective well-being, including satisfaction, inﬂuences objective measures, as for example income. This would then require explicit identiﬁcation strategies for estimating effects of income on life satisfaction. I address this issue using German SOEP data and Lewbel’s (2012) method, ...

2021| Susanne Elsas

SOEPpapers 1142 / 2021

Limited Self-knowledge and Survey Response Behavior

We study response behavior in surveys and show how the explanatory power of self-reports can be improved. First, we develop a choice model of survey response behavior under the assumption that the respondent has imperfect self-knowledge about her individual characteristics. In panel data, the model predicts that the variance in responses for different characteristics increases in self-knowledge and ...

2021| Armin Falk, Thomas Neuber, Philipp Strack

SOEPpapers 1141 / 2021

Pension Wealth and the Gender Wealth Gap

We examine the gender wealth gap with a focus on pension wealth and statutory pension rights. By taking into account employment characteristics of women and men, we are able and identify the extent to which the redistributive effect of pension rights reduces the gap. The empirical basis of this examination is the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), which is one of the few datasets where information on wealth ...

2021| Karla Cordova, Markus M. Grabka, Eva Sierminska

SOEPpapers 1140 / 2021

On the Right Track? – The Role of Work Experience in Migrant Mothers’ Current Employment Probability

This paper investigates the role of work experience in migrant mothers’ current employment in Germany. Unlike previous papers, we focus on actual experience and add the motherhood aspect. To this end, we use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel 2013-2018 including the IAB-SOEP Migration Sample. Having immigrated to Germany and female sex are the two treatments of our sample of 491 migrant mothers, ...

2021| Christina Boll, Andreas Lagemann

SOEPpapers 1139 / 2021

Why a Labour Market Boom Does Not Necessarily Bring Down Inequality: Putting Together Germany’s Inequality Puzzle

After an economically tough start into the new millennium, Germany experienced an unprecedented employment boom after 2005 only stopped by the COVID-19 pandemic. Persistently high levels of inequality despite a booming labour market and drastically falling unemployment rates constituted a puzzle, suggesting either that the German job miracle mainly beneﬁtted individuals in the mid- or high-income range ...

2021| Martin Biewen, Miriam Sturm

SOEPpapers 1137 / 2021

SOEP-RV: Linking German Socio-Economic Panel Data to Pension Records

The aim of the project SOEP-RV is to link data from participants in the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) survey to their individual Deutsche Rentenversicherung (German Pension Insurance) records. For all SOEP respondents who give explicit consent to record linkage, SOEP-RV creates a linked dataset that combines the comprehensive multi-topic SOEP data with detailed cross-sectional and longitudinal ...

2021| Carsten Schröder

SOEPpapers 1136 / 2021

Psychische Gesundheit im zweiten Covid-19 Lockdown in Deutschland

Die vorliegende Studie vergleicht das Niveau der selbstberichteten psychischen Gesundheit und des Wohlbeﬁndens in Deutschland im zweiten Covid-19 Lockdown (Januar/Februar 2021) mit der Situation im ersten Lockdown (März bis Juli 2020). Im zweiten Lockdown sank die Zufriedenheit mit der Gesundheit und stiegen die Sorgen um die Gesundheit im Vergleich zum ersten Lockdown. Beide Werte blieben aber weiterhin ...

2021| Theresa Entringer, Hannes Kröger

SOEPpapers 1135 / 2021

Using Mathematical Graphs for Questionnaire Testing in Large-Scale Surveys

In this article, we present an automated test procedure for examining the filter structure and instructions implemented in electronic questionnaires, and for checking the fit of a questionnaire to the targeted sample. With our approach, we can represent and describe questionnaires using mathematical graphs and specify questionnaire properties in a formal and standardised way. It also allows us deriving ...

2021| Katharina Stark, Sabine Zinn

SOEPpapers 1134 / 2021

Why Time Cannot Heal All Wounds: Personal Wealth Trajectories of Divorced and Married Men and Women

Amid concerns of long-term economic consequences of divorce, cross-sectional research illustrated that ever-divorce men but particularly women hold less per capita wealth than continuously married spouses in older age. Using a longitudinal approach and unique personal-level wealth data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study, the present study aims to understand how divorce stratifies men’s and ...

2021| Nicole Kapelle

SOEPpapers 1133 / 2021

The Long-Run Effects of Sports Club Vouchers for Primary School Children

Starting in 2009, the German state of Saxony distributed sports club membership vouchers among all 33,000 third graders in the state. The policy’s objective was to encourage them to develop a long-term habit of exercising. In 2018, we carried out a large register-based survey among several cohorts in Saxony and two neighboring states. Our difference-in-differences estimations show that, even after ...

2021| Jan Marcus, Thomas Siedler, Nicolas R. Ziebarth

SOEPpapers 1132 / 2021

Time Spent on School-Related Activities at Home during the Pandemic: A Longitudinal Analysis of Social Group Inequality among Secondary School Students

Substantial educational inequalities have been documented in Germany for decades. In this article, we examine whether educational inequalities among children have increased or remained the same since the school closures of spring 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our perspective is longitudinal: We compare the amount of time children in secondary schools spent on school-related activities at home ...

2021| Sabine Zinn, Michael Bayer

SOEPpapers 1131 / 2021

Shared Parenting and Parents’ Income Evolution after Separation: New Explorative Insights from Germany

Based on panel data from 1997 to 2018, we investigate the socioeconomic preconditions and economic consequences of ‘shared parenting (SP)’ forms in Germany. Referring to the post-separation year, we build SP groups from information on child residence and fathers’ childcare hours during a regular weekday. We explore the short-term gender and SP group associations with economic well-being as well as, ...

2021| Christina Boll, Simone Schüller

SOEPpapers 1130 / 2021

Hate Is Too Great a Burden to Bear: Hate Crimes and the Mental Health of Refugees

Against a background of increasing violence against non-natives, we estimate the effect of hate crime on refugees’ mental health in Germany. For this purpose, we combine two datasets: administrative records on xenophobic crime against refugee shelters by the Federal Criminal Office and the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees. We apply a regression discontinuity design in time to estimate the effect of ...

2021| Daniel Graeber, Felicitas Schikora

SOEPpapers 1129 / 2021

Income Changes Do Not Influence Political Participation: Evidence from Comparative Panel Data

The income gradient in political participation is a widely accepted stylized fact. This article asks how income effects on political involvement unfold over time. Using nine panel datasets from six countries, it analyzes whether income changes have short-term effects on political involvement, whether effects vary across the life-cycle, and whether parental income has an independent influence. Irrespective ...

2021| Sebastian Jungkunz, Paul Marx

SOEPpapers 1128 / 2021

Happiness, Domains of Life Satisfaction, Perceptions, and Valuation Differences across Genders

Happiness is strongly associated with goal attainment, productivity, mental health and suicidal risk. This paper examines the effect of satisfaction with areas of life on subjective well-being (SWB), the importance of relative perceptions compared to absolute measures in predicting overall life satisfaction, and differences in the domains of life which have the greatest impact on happiness of men and ...

2021| Stefani Milovanska-Farrington, Stephen Farrington

SOEPpapers 1127 / 2021

Do You Really Want to Share Everything? The Wellbeing of Work-Linked Couples

Work as well as family life are crucial sources of human wellbeing, which however often interfere. This is especially so if partners work in the same occupation or industry. At the same time, being work-linked may beneﬁt their career success. Still, surprisingly little is known about the wellbeing of work-linked couples. Our study ﬁlls this gap by examining the satisfaction differences between work-linked ...

2021| Juliane Hennecke, Clemens Hetschko

SOEPpapers 1126 / 2021

Trade Shocks, Fertility, and Marital Behavior

Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we analyze the effects of exposure to trade on the fertility and marital behavior of German workers. We ﬁnd that individuals working in sectors that were more affected by import competition from Eastern Europe and suffered worse labor market outcomes were less likely to have children. In contrast, workers in sectors that beneﬁted from increased ...

2021| Osea Giuntella, Lorenzo Rotunno, Luca Stella

Redaktion und Hinweise für AutorInnen