DIW Berlin: SOEPpapers

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 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 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

SOEPpapers 1125 / 2021

Auswirkungen von Referenzzeiträumen auf die Selbstangaben zum freiwilligen Engagement: Ergebnisse einer experimentellen Studie

In der vorliegenden Studie wird untersucht, inwiefern sich der Einsatz eines spezifischen Zeitfensters bei Survey-Abfragen zum ehrenamtlichen und freiwilligen Engagement – im Vergleich zu Survey-Abfragen mit unspezifischen Zeitfenstern – auf die Selbstangaben von Befragten auswirkt. Die Grundlage der Untersuchung bildet ein Experiment, welches zu diesem Zweck im Rahmen des SOEP-Innovationssamples (SOEP-IS) ...

2021| Nadiya Kelle, Luise Burkhardt, Corinna Kausmann, Julia Simonson, Jürgen Schupp, Clemens Tesch-Römer

SOEPpapers 1124 / 2021

Social Isolation and Loneliness in the Context of Migration: A Cross-Sectional Study of Refugees, Migrants, and the Native Population in Germany

The study of loneliness and social isolation has provided a lot of evidence for differences in the prevalence of the two, depending on the context of individuals. Given different social, legal, and economic differences for migrants and refugees, it has been documented that these groups show elevated levels of both social isolation and loneliness compared to the respective host population. Differences ...

2021| Lea-Maria Löbel, Hannes Kröger, Ana Nanette Tibubos

SOEPpapers 1123 / 2021

Life Satisfaction, Pro-Activity, and Employment

Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), this paper investigates how pro-active time-use (e.g., in sports/arts/socializing) relates to subjective well-being of the unemployed and their probability of finding a new job. Allowing for a variety of socio-demographic and -economic observed characteristics, we find that pro-activity is negatively associated with the well-being ...

2021| Alpaslan Akay, Gökhan Karabulut, Levent Yilmaz

SOEPpapers 1122 / 2021

Wage Determination in the Shadow of the Law: The Case of Works Councilors in Germany

The German law on co-determination at the plant level (Betriebsverfassungsgesetz) stipulates that works councilors are neither to be financially rewarded nor penalized for their activities. This regulation contrasts with publicized instances of excessive payments. The divergence has sparked a debate about the need to reform the law. This paper provides representative evidence on wage payments to works ...

2021| Laszlo Goerke, Markus Pannenberg

SOEPpapers 1121 / 2021

Job Placement via Private vs. Public Employment Agencies: Investigating Selection Effects and Job Match Quality in Germany

Employment agencies aim to match individuals to appropriate jobs. There are public and private employment agencies, which co-exist in many countries. Selection effects may be relevant in the sense that private agencies potentially engage in ‘cream-skimming’ by prioritizing highly qualified workers. The resulting job match quality is also important from an individual, a firm, and a society perspective. ...

2021| Adam Ayaita, Christian Grund, Lisa Pütz

SOEPpapers 1120 / 2021

The Child Penalty: Implications of Parenthood on Labour Market Outcomes for Men and Women in Germany

Whilst gender inequality has been falling in the developed world, child-related gender inequality in pay has stayed constant. In this paper I use German panel data spanning across 33 years from 1984 until 2017 including over 50,000 individuals. The main contribution of this paper is the analysis of the effect of parenthood on women’s and men’s earnings using propensity score matching. I estimate the ...

2021| Charlotte H. Feldhoff

SOEPpapers 1119 / 2021

An Economic Analysis of the Empty Nest Syndrome: What the Leaving Child Does Matters

This study is an empirical investigation of the empty nest syndrome, commonly understood as a situation where there are feelings of loss or loneliness for mothers and/or fathers following the departure of the last child from the family home. This investigation makes use of rich, longitudinal, nationally representative German data to assess whether there is evidence for such a syndrome. Furthermore, ...

2021| Alan Piper

SOEPpapers 1117 / 2021

Risk Preference and Entrepreneurial Investment at the Top of the Wealth Distribution

We present ﬁrst evidence how individual risk preferences shape entrepreneurial investment among the very wealthy using novel survey data from the top of the wealth distribution, which have been added to the 2019 German Socio-economic Panel Study. The data include private wealth balance sheets, in particular the value of own private business assets, and a standard measure of risk tolerance. We ﬁnd that ...

2021| Frank M. Fossen, Johannes König, Carsten Schröder

SOEPpapers 1116 / 2021

Quantifying the Externalities of Renewable Energy Plants Using Wellbeing Data: The Case of Biogas

Although there is strong support for renewable energy plants, they are often met with local resistance. We quantify the externalities of renewable energy plants using well-being data. We focus on the example of biogas, one of the most frequently deployed technologies besides wind and solar. To this end, we combine longitudinal household data with novel panel data on more than 13, 000 installations ...

2021| Christian Krekel, Julia Rechlitz, Johannes Rode, Alexander Zerrahn

SOEPpapers 1115 / 2020

First Time Around: Local Conditions and Multi-dimensional Integration of Refugees

We study the causal effect of local labor market conditions and attitudes towards immigrants at the time of arrival on refugees’ multi-dimensional integration outcomes (economic, linguistic, navigational, political, psychological, and social). Using a unique dataset on refugees, we leverage a centralized allocation policy in Germany where refugees were exogenously assigned to live in speciﬁc counties. ...

2020| Cevat Giray Aksoy, Panu Poutvaara, Felicitas Schikora

SOEPpapers 1114 / 2020

Improving the Coverage of the Top-Wealth Population in the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)

We have developed and implemented a new sampling strategy to better represent very wealthy individuals in the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Our strategy is based on the empirical regularity that the very wealthy have at least part of their assets invested in businesses, and that businesses document shares of relevant shareholders in their books. Our results show that combined analysis of the ...

2020| Carsten Schröder, Charlotte Bartels, Konstantin Göbler, Markus M. Grabka, Johannes König, Rainer Siegers, Sabine Zinn

SOEPpapers 1113 / 2020

Risk Preferences and Training Investments

We analyze workers’ risk preferences and training investments. Our conceptual framework differentiates between the investment risk and insurance mechanisms underpin-ning training decisions. Investment risk leads risk-averse workers to train less; they undertake more training if it insures them against future losses. We use the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) to demonstrate that risk affinity is ...

2020| Marco Caliendo, Deborah A. Cobb-Clark, Cosima Obst, Arne Uhlendorff

SOEPpapers 1112 / 2020

Suddenly a Stay-At-Home Dad? Short- and Long-term Consequences of Fathers’ Job Loss on Time Investment in the Household

Commonly described as the “gender care gap”, there is a persistent gender difference in the division of domestic responsibilities in most developed countries. We provide novel evidence on the short- and long-run effects of an exogenous shock on paternal availability, through a job loss, on the allocation of domestic work within couples. We ﬁnd that paternal child care and housework signiﬁcantly increase ...

2020| Juliane Hennecke, Astrid Pape

SOEPpapers 1111 / 2020

Measuring Housing Costs and Housing Affordability Using SOEP: An Example Applied to Older Households

This paper explores the methodological issues to take into account when using SOEP as a database for calculating a measure of housing costs and housing affordability. For this purpose, we focus on the evolution of housing costs for households headed by elderly people between 1998 and 2018. Our review yields two clear conclusions: (1) that SOEP represents a valuable source of data for calculating household ...

2020| Alberto Lozano Alcántara, Laura Romeu Gordo

SOEPpapers 1110 / 2020

In Sickness and in Health? Health Shocks and Relationship Breakdown: Empirical Evidence from Germany

From an economic perspective, marriage and long-term partnership can be seen as a risk-pooling device. This informal insurance contract is, however, not fully enforceable. Each partner is free to leave when his or her support is needed in case of an adverse life event. An adverse health shock is a prominent example for such events. Since relationship breakdown itself is an extremely stressful experience, ...

2020| Christian Bünnings, Lucas Hafner, Simon Reif, Harald Tauchmann

SOEPpapers 1109 / 2020

Temps Dip Deeper: Temporary Employment and the Midlife Nadir in Human Well-Being

Temporary employees rank lower than permanent employees on various measures of mental and physical health, including well-being. In parallel, much research has shown that the relationship between age and well-being traces an approximate U-shape, with a nadir in midlife. Temporary employment may well have different associations with well-being across the lifespan, likely harming people in midlife more ...

2020| Alan Piper

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