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SOEPpapers 934 / 2017
There is a growing concern that the widespread use of computers, mobile phones and other digital devices before bedtime disrupts our sleep with detrimental effects on our health and cognitive performance. High-speed Internet promotes the use of electronic devices, video games and Internet addiction (e.g., online games and cyberloafing). Exposure to artificial light from tablets and PCs can alterate ...
2017| Francesco C. Billari, Osea Giuntella, Luca Stella
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SOEPpapers 933 / 2017
As from a political economy perspective, politicians often fail to implement structural reforms, we investigate if the resistance to reform is based on the differences in the risk preferences of voters, politicians, and bureaucrats. Based on the empirical results of a survey of the population in Germany, 175 members of the Federal German Parliament (Bundestag), and 106 officials (“bureaucrats”) from ...
2017| Tobias Thomas, Moritz Heß, Gert G. Wagner
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SOEPpapers 932 / 2017
This study examines dynamics of solo self-employment. In particular, we investigate the extent of true state dependence and cross state dependence, i.e., whether experiencing solo selfemployment causally affects the probability of becoming an employer in the future. We use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to estimate dynamic multinomial logit models. Our results show that the extent of true ...
2017| Daniel S. J. Lechmann, Christoph Wunder
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SOEPpapers 931 / 2017
In this paper we reconsider the relationship between income on health, taking a distributional perspective rather than one centered on conditional expectation. Using Structured Additive Distributional Regression, we find that the association between income on health is larger than generally estimated because aspects of the conditional health distribution that go beyond the expectation imply worse outcomes ...
2017| Alexander Silbersdorff, Julia Lynch, Stephan Klasen, Thomas Kneib
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SOEPpapers 930 / 2017
Several studies have analyzed different motives to work in the public versus private sector. Some studies focus on prosocial motivation, others focus on need for security (risk aversion). However, the study of prosocial motivation in the context of public sector employment has largely focused on altruism and neglected other forms of prosocial motivation, in particular civic virtue, the motive to contribute ...
2017| Omar Adam Ayaita, Filiz Gülal, Philip Yang
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SOEPpapers 929 / 2017
Auf Basis repräsentativer Daten des Sozio-oekonomischen Panel (SOEP) können wir zeigen, dass das Lohnniveau und der berufliche Status positiv, die Anzahl an Überstunden dagegen negativ mit der Arbeitszufriedenheit zusammenhängen. Die Anwendung stringenter längsschnittlichen Analyselogiken (bzw. die damit verbundene, vollständige Kontrolle von personenspezifischer Heterogenität) legt nahe, dass es sich ...
2017| Marco Giesselmann, Mila Staneva, Jürgen Schupp, David Richter
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SOEPpapers 928 / 2017
The spread of high-speed Internet epitomizes the digital revolution, affecting several aspects of our life. Using German panel data, we test whether the availability of broadband Internet influences fertility choices in a low-fertility setting, which is well-known for the difficulty to combine work and family life. We exploit a strategy devised by Falck et al. (2014) to obtain causal estimates of the ...
2017| Francesco C. Billari, Osea Giuntella, Luca Stella
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SOEPpapers 927 / 2017
A growing literature has tried to measure the extent to which individuals have equal opportunities to acquire income. At the same time, policy makers have doubled down on efforts to go beyond income when measuring well-being. We attempt to bridge these two areas by measuring the extent to which individuals have equal opportunities to achieve a high level of well-being. We use the German Socio-Economic ...
2017| Daniel Gerszon Mahler, Xavier Ramos
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SOEPpapers 926 / 2017
This paper presents a methodology for comparing income rank volatility profiles over time and across distributions. While most of the existing measures are affected by changes in marginal distributions, this paper proposes a framework that is based on individuals’ relative positions in the distribution, and is neutral in relation to structural changes that occur in the economy. Applying this approach ...
2017| Louis Chauvel, Anne Hartung, Flaviana Palmisano
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SOEPpapers 925 / 2017
We study the usually assumed trade-off between income and leisure in labor supply decisions using comprehensive German panel data. We compare non-employed individuals after plant closures with employed people regarding both income and time use as well as their subjective perceptions of these two factors. We find that the gain of non-working time translates into higher satisfaction with free time, while ...
2017| Adrian Chadi, Clemens Hetschko
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SOEPpapers 924 / 2017
This study investigates whether energy efficiency investments are driven by differences in personality traits among homeowners. Using data on nearly 3,000 households in Germany, we estimate that compared to the median level, homeowners in the lowest quartile of Openness to Experience have 5.0%-23.4% lower propensity to invest in capital-intensive energy efficiency measures, while homeowners in the ...
2017| Ante Busic-Sontic, Franz Fuerst
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SOEPpapers 923 / 2017
Previous studies report a range of estimates for the response of female labor supply and childcare attendance to childcare prices. We shed new light on these questions using a policy reform that raises the price of public daycare. After the reform, children are 8 percentage points less likely to attend public daycare which implies a compensated price elasticity of -0.6. There is little labor supply ...
2017| Christina Gathmann, Björn Sass
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SOEPpapers 922 / 2017
We investigate how personal income taxes affect the portfolio share of personal wealth that entrepreneurs invest in their own business. In a reformulation of the standard portfolio choice model that allows for underreporting of private business income to tax authorities, we show that a fall in the tax rate may increase investment in risky entrepreneurial business equity at the intensive margin, but ...
2017| Frank M. Fossen, Ray Rees, Davud Rostam-Afschar, Viktor Steiner
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SOEPpapers 921 / 2017
This paper investigates heterogeneous wage effects of non-cognitive skills across the wage distribution. I develop a model of wage determination under uncertainty with respect to individual productivity based on three components (minimum wages, productivity premiums, bargaining premiums). Based on this model, I expect (i) a larger importance and (ii) larger effects of non-cognitive skills for high-wage ...
2017| Matthias Collischon
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SOEPpapers 920 / 2017
As in most OECD countries, smoking prevalence and cigarette consumption have been decreasing in Germany since the early 2000s. This paper analyses whether smoking prevalence and cigarette consumption, as well as their development over time, differ between socio-economic subgroups. Identifying these differences provides insights into the effect of policy interventions on German smoking behaviour. Based ...
2017| Daniela Heilert, Ashok Kaul
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SOEPpapers 919 / 2017
It is well-documented that well-being typically evinces precipitous decrements at the end of life. However, research has primarily taken a postdictive approach by knowing the outcome (date of death) and aligning in retrospect how well-being has changed for people with documented death events. In the present study, we made use of a predictive approach by examining whether and how levels of and changes ...
2017| Gizem Hülür, Jutta Heckhausen, Christiane A. Hoppmann, Frank J. Infurna, Gert G. Wagner, Nilam Ram, Denis Gerstorf
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SOEPpapers 918 / 2017
We investigate how worries in Germany change across time and age, drawing on both closed-ended questions (which typically list a number of worry items) and open-ended questions answered in text format. We find that relevant world events influence worries. For example, worries about peace peaked in 2003, the year of the Iraq War, with a considerable number of respondents also referring to the Iraq war ...
2017| Julia M. Rohrer, Martin Bruemmer, Jürgen Schupp, Gert G. Wagner
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SOEPpapers 917 / 2017
In Germany, private health insurance covers more innovative and costly treatments than public insurance. Moreover, privately insured individuals are treated preferentially by doctors. In this article, I use subjective health data to examine whether these superior features of private insurance actually transfer into better health. I focus on German adolescents who are still in education to control for ...
2017| René Petilliot
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SOEPpapers 916 / 2017
A large literature aims to establish a causal link between education and health using changes in compulsory schooling laws. It is however unclear how well more education is operationalized by marginal increases in school years. We shed a new light on this discussion by analyzing the health effects of a reform in Germany where total years of schooling forstudents in the academic track were reduced from ...
2017| Johanna Sophie Quis, Simon Reif
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SOEPpapers 915 / 2017
To equalize differences in health plan premiums due to differences in risk pools, the German legislature introduced a simple Risk Adjustment Scheme (RAS) based on age, gender and disability status in 1994. In addition, effective 1996, consumers gained the freedom to choose among hundreds of existing health plans, across employers and state-borders. This paper (a) estimates RAS pass-through rates on ...
2017| Adam Pilny, Ansgar Wübker, Nicolas R. Ziebarth