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SOEPpapers 1036 / 2019
In the last years, there has been a shift from traditional measurements of affective well-being to approaches such as the day reconstruction method (DRM). While the traditional approaches often assess trait level differences in well-being, the DRM allows examining affective dynamics in everyday contexts. The latter may ultimately explain why some people feel more happy than others (e.g., because they ...
2019| Dave Möwisch, Florian Schmiedek, David Richter, Annette Brose
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SOEPpapers 1035 / 2019
This paper analyzes the effect of a recently introduced policy reform on participation in integration courses and on certified language proficiency levels among refugees in Germany. The residence rule restricts initial residence for refugees with a permanent residence permit. Given that treatment intensity varies distinctly across states, I utilize this quasi-experiment and apply a difference-in-differences ...
2019| Felicitas Schikora
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SOEPpapers 1034 / 2019
A landmark study published in PNAS (Côté S, House J, Willer R, 2015, 112:15838–15843, doi:10.1073/pnas.1511536112) showed that higher income individuals are less generous than poorer individuals only if they reside in a U.S. state with comparatively large economic inequality. This finding might serve to reconcile inconsistent findings on the effect of social class on generosity by highlighting the ...
2019| Stefan C. Schmukle, Martin Korndörfer, Boris Egloff
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SOEPpapers 1033 / 2019
In this study we investigate the link between the job search channels that workers use to find employment and the probability of occupational mismatch in the new job. Our specific focus is on differences between native and immigrant workers. We use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) over the period 2000-2014. First, we document that referral hiring via social networks is the most frequent ...
2019| Sevak Alaverdyan, Anna Zaharieva
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SOEPpapers 1032 / 2019
Working-time political debates often focus on options for flexible and variable working hours. Meanwhile, employees' desire for more time sovereignty is gaining relevance. Although working time preferences and their impact on the German labor market are investigated in numerous studies, findings are inconsistent, varying with the data set, including the formulation and placement of questions in the ...
2019| Verena Tobsch, Elke Holst
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SOEPpapers 1031 / 2019
Using the 41-year division of Germany as a natural experiment, we show that the GDR’s gender-equal institutions created a culture that has undone the male breadwinner norm and its consequences. Since reunification, East Germany still differs from West Germany not only by a higher female contribution to household income, but also because East German women can earn more than their husbands without having ...
2019| Quentin Lippmann, Alexandre Georgieff, Claudia Senik
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SOEPpapers 1030 / 2019
We exploit the natural experiment of German reunification in 1990 to investigate if the institutional regimes of the formerly socialist (rather gender-equal) East Germany and the capitalist (rather gender-traditional) West Germany shaped different gender identity prescriptions of family breadwinning. We use data for three periods between 1984 and 2016 from the representative German Socio-Economic Panel ...
2019| Maximilian Sprengholz, Anna Wieber, Elke Holst
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SOEPpapers 1029 / 2019
The mental health and well-being of refugees are both prerequisites for and indicators of social integration. Using data from the first wave of a representative prospective panel of refugees living in Germany, we investigated how different living conditions, especially those subject to integration policies, are associated with experienced distress and life satisfaction in newly-arrived adult refugees. ...
2019| Lena Walther, Lukas M. Fuchs, Jürgen Schupp, Christian von Scheve
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SOEPpapers 1028 / 2019
We estimate the causal effect of maternal education on the mental health of mother’s children in late adolescence and adulthood. Theoretical considerations are ambiguous about a causal effect of maternal education on children’s mental health. To identify the causal effect of maternal education, we exploit exogenous variation in maternal years of schooling, caused by a compulsory schooling law reform ...
2019| Daniel Graeber, Daniel D. Schnitzlein
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SOEPpapers 1027 / 2019
This empirical investigation into life satisfaction, using nationally representative German panel data, finds a substantial association with an individual’s thoughts about the future, whether they are optimistic or pessimistic about it. Furthermore, including individuals’ optimism and pessimism about the future substantially increases the explanatory power of standard life satisfaction models. The ...
2019| Alan Piper
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SOEPpapers 1026 / 2019
We show that the disposition to focus on favorable or unfavorable outcomes of risky situations affects willingness to take risk as measured by the general risk question. We demonstrate that this disposition, which we call risk conception, is strongly associated with optimism, a stable facet of personality, and that it predicts real-life risk taking. The general risk question captures this disposition ...
2019| Thomas Dohmen, Simone Quercia, Jana Willrodt
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SOEPpapers 1025 / 2019
Women-friendly policies may have perverse effects on the wages of employed women and mothers in particular. Yet few have addressed the causal impact of such policies and the mechanisms they might trigger at the individual level to produce such wage responses. We assess if and how two decades of reforms of parental leave schemes in Germany have shaped changes in the motherhood wage penalty over time. ...
2019| Gabriele Mari, Giorgio Cutuli
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SOEPpapers 1024 / 2019
Based on the German Socio-Economic Panel, the influence of the body mass index on health, earnings and satisfaction is analysed by gender. Basic results are: health worsens, income declines and satisfaction is poorer with higher body mass index. If control variables are added, estimates are split by gender and different effects of over- and underweight people are determined, the health estimates show ...
2019| Olaf Hübler
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SOEPpapers 1023 / 2019
This study analyses the relationship between life expectancy and parental education. Based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study and survival analysis models, we show that maternal education is related to children’s life expectancy – even after controlling for children’sown level of education. This applies equally to daughters and sons as well as to children’s further life expectancies ...
2019| Mathias Huebener
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SOEPpapers 1022 / 2019
In dieser Studie werden auf der Basis einer Weiterentwicklung des ZEW Mikrosimulationsmodells des Abgaben- Steuer- und Transfersystems fiskalische und individuelle Nettoerträge und Renditen von Bildungsinvestitionen für junge Erwachsene bezogen auf das Jahr 2016 untersucht und mit früheren Schätzungen bezogen auf das Jahr 2012 verglichen. Nach den Ergebnissen liegt die fiskalische Bildungsrendite pro ...
2019| Friedhelm Pfeiffer, Holger Stichnoth
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SOEPpapers 1021 / 2019
Neither market income nor consumption expenditure provides an adequate picture of individual standard of living. It is time which enables and restricts individual activities and is a further brick to a more comprehensive picture of individual well-being. In our study we focus on a prominent part of time use in non-market services: it is parental child care which contributes not only to individual but ...
2019| Joachim Merz, Normen Peters
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SOEPpapers 1020 / 2019
This paper investigates the role of works councils in job satisfaction. Using the recently developed Linked Personnel Panel, we consider both the direct and indirect impact via further training. Basic estimates on an individual level do not reveal clearly direct effects, but on an establishment level, the existence of a works council increases the average job satisfaction in a company. In more extended ...
2019| Lutz Bellmann, Olaf Hübler, Ute Leber
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SOEPpapers 1019 / 2018
With the arrival of over one million asylum seekers in Germany in 2015, policy discussions opened whether refugees should be spread across the country or spatially concentrated in order to facilitate their integration in society. When an immigrant locates in a residential area with many natives or many foreigners he has access to different respective social networks which are important for the labor ...
2018| Sebastian Reil
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SOEPpapers 1018 / 2018
In 2015, Germany introduced a statutory hourly minimum wage that was not only universally binding but also set at a relatively high level. We discuss the short-run effects of this new minimum wage on a wide set of socio-economic outcomes, such as employment and working hours, earnings and wage inequality, dependent and selff-employment, as well as reservation wages and satisfaction. We also discuss ...
2018| Marco Caliendo, Carsten Schröder, Linda Wittbrodt
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SOEPpapers 1017 / 2018
In this paper, we analyze how the formal recognition of immigrants' foreign occupational qualifications afects their subsequent labor market outcomes. The empirical analysis is based on a novel German data set that links respondents' survey information to their administrative records, allowing us to observe immigrants at monthly intervals before, during and after their application for occupational recognition. ...
2018| Herbert Brücker, Albrecht Glitz, Adrian Lerche, Agnese Romiti