Women have been found to be, on average, less interested in politics and less politically active than men, which might reduce the representation of women’s interests in a democracy. In order to enhance the understanding of these gender gaps, this preregistered study analyzes the role of personality differences for gender gaps in political interest and activity.I use a large representative sample of ...
Evidence shows that working time mismatch, i.e. the difference between actual and desired working hours, is negatively related to employees’ job satisfaction. Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we examine the potential moderating effect of working time autonomy on this relation and we also consider the corresponding role of gender. First, individual fixed effects panel estimations ...
Watching television is the most time-consuming human activity besides work but its role for individual well-being is unclear. Negative consequences portrayed in the literature raise the question whether this popular pastime constitutes an economic good or bad, and hence serves as a prime example of irrational behavior reducing individual health and happiness. Using rich panel data, we are the first ...
Single mothers often experience precarious financial conditions. However, it is not fully understood to what extent separation is the cause of these conditions versus being their consequence. Estimating an endogenous switching regression model based on a sample of 626 separated and 5,525 non-separated mothers drawn from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) 1984-2018, we disentangle the roles of causation ...
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 ...
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 ...
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
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, ...
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 ...
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
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, ...
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 ...
Objective: At work, people are confronted with clear behavioral expectations. In line with the Social Investment Principle, the beginning and ending of working life might thus promote changes in personality traits that are relevant at work (e.g., Conscientiousness). Method: Based on the data from the Socio- Economic Panel Study (SOEP), we examined nuanced differences of the Big Five personality traits ...
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| Holger Lüthen, Carsten Schröder, Markus M. Grabka, Jan Goebel, Tatjana Mika, Daniel Brüggmann, Sebastian Ellert, Hannah Penz
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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
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 ...
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, ...