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SOEPpapers 754 / 2015
During the European sovereign debt crisis, most countries that ran into fiscal trouble had Catholic majorities, whereas countries with Protestant majorities were able to avoid fiscal problems. Survey data show that, within Germany, views on theeuro differ between Protestants and Non-Protestants, too. Among Protestants, concerns about the euro have, compared to Non-Protestants, increased during the ...
2015| Adrian Chadi, Matthias Krapf
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SOEPpapers 753 / 2015
The gender wage gap is a persistent labor market phenomenon. Most research focuses on the determinants of these wage differences. We contribute to this literature by exploring a different research question: if wages of women are systematically lower than male wages, what are the distributional consequences (disposable income) and what are the labor market effects (labor supply) of the wage gap? We ...
2015| Patricia Gallego-Granados, Johannes Geyer
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SOEPpapers 752 / 2015
In this paper we study the effect of television exposure on fertility. We exploit a natural experiment that took place in Germany after WWII. For topographical reasons, Western TV programs, which promoted one/no child families, could not be received in certain parts of East Germany. Using an IV approach, we find robust evidence that watching West German TV results in lower fertility. This conclusion ...
2015| Peter Bönisch, Walter Hyll
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SOEPpapers 751 / 2015
Compulsory military service is a uniformed life event disrupting the lives of young men (and sometimes women) in countries with conscription. Consequently, the development of personality and subjective well-being during service was investigated using representative population data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. In line with previous findings, men who chose military service revealed descriptively ...
2015| Johannes Schult, Jörn R. Sparfeldt
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SOEPpapers 750 / 2015
We analyze empirically the optimal design of social insurance and assistance programs when families obtain insurance by making labor supply choices for both spouses. For this purpose, we specify a structural life-cycle model of the labor supply and savings decisions of singles and married couples. Partial insurance against wage and employment shocks is provided by social programs, savings and the labor ...
2015| Peter Haan, Victoria Prowse
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SOEPpapers 749 / 2015
Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, this paper analyses the effects of spending part of adolescents’ leisure time on playing music or doing sports, or both. We find that while playing music fosters educational outcomes compared to doing sports, particularly so for girls and children from more highly educated families, doing sports improves subjective health. For educational outcomes, doing ...
2015| Charlotte Cabane, Adrian Hille, Michael Lechner
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SOEPpapers 748 / 2015
This paper is the first to link economic theory with empirical life-satisfaction analyses referring to internal migration. We derive an extension of the Roback (1982) model to account for benefits from regional amenities in the utility function, while controlling for income, housing costs, and migration costs. Using highly disaggregated spatial panel information on people’s migration decisions and ...
2015| Angela Faßhauer, Katrin Rehdanz
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SOEPpapers 747 / 2015
For representative German panel data, we document that voluntary job switching is associated with higher levels of life satisfaction, though only for some time, whereas forced job changes do not affect life satisfaction clearly. Using plant closures as an exogenous trigger of switching to a new employer, we find that job mobility turns out to be harmful for satisfaction with family life. By investigating ...
2015| Adrian Chadi, Clemens Hetschko
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SOEPpapers 746 / 2015
Measures of affordability are applied in practice, e.g., to assess the affordability of energy services, water or housing. They can be interpreted as measures of deprivation in a specific domain of consumption. The large body of literature on affordability measure has little overlap with the existing literature on poverty measurement. A comprehensive assessment of the response of affordability measures ...
2015| Peter Heindl, Rudolf Schüssler
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SOEPpapers 745 / 2015
Sleep is an important part of life, with an individual spending an estimated 32 years of her life asleep. Despite this importance, little is known about life satisfaction and sleep duration. Using German panel data, it is shown that sleep is an important factor for life satisfaction and that maximal life satisfaction is associated with about eight hours of sleep on a typical weekday. This figure represents, ...
2015| Alan T. Piper
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SOEPpapers 744 / 2015
Daylight savings time (DST) represents a public good with costs and benefits. We provide the first comprehensive examination of the welfare effects of the spring and autumn transitions for the UK and Germany. Using individual-level data and a regression discontinuity design, we estimate the effect of the transitions on life satisfaction. Our results show that individuals in both the UK and Germany ...
2015| Daniel Kuehnle, Christoph Wunder
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SOEPpapers 743 / 2015
We study the returns to apprenticeship and vocational training for three early labor market outcomes all measured at age 25 for East and West German youths: non-employment (i.e., unemployment or out of the labor force), permanent fulltime employment, and wages. We find strong positive effects of apprenticeship and vocational training. There are no significant differences for different types of vocational ...
2015| Regina T. Riphahn, Michael Zibrowius
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SOEPpapers 742 / 2015
Who is most likely to change their risk preferences over the lifecourse? Using German nationally representative survey data and methods to separate age from cohort effects, we estimate the lifecycle patterns in the socioeconomic gradient of self-reported risk preferences. Tolerance to risk drops by 0.5 SD across all groups from late adolescence to age 40. From mid to old age, risk tolerance continues ...
2015| Stefanie Schurer
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SOEPpapers 741 / 2015
This paper empirically assesses the relative role of health plan prices, service quality and optional benefits in the decision to choose a health plan. We link representative German SOEP panel data from 2007 to 2010 to (i) health plan service quality indicators, (ii) measures of voluntary benefit provision on top of federally mandated benefits, and (iii) health plan prices for almost all German health ...
2015| Christian Bünnings, Hendrik Schmitz, Harald Tauchmann, Nicolas R. Ziebarth
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SOEPpapers 740 / 2015
This paper examines the added worker effect (AWE), which refers to the increase of labor supply of individuals in response to a sudden financial shock in family income, that is, unemployment of their partner. While previous empirical studies focus on married women's response to those shocks, I explicitly analyze the spillover effects of unemployment on both women and men and I also differentiate according ...
2015| Doreen Triebe
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SOEPpapers 739 / 2015
We consider the link between poverty and subjective well-being, and focus in particular on the role of time. We use panel data on 49,000 individuals living in Germany from 1992 to 2012 to uncover three empirical relationships. First, life satisfaction falls with both the incidence and intensity of contemporaneous poverty. Second, poverty scars: those who have been poor in the past report lower life ...
2015| Andrew E. Clark, Conchita D'Ambrosio, Simone Ghislandi
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SOEPpapers 738 / 2015
How socio-cultural contexts shape individual functioning is of prime interest for psychological inquiry. Secular increases favoring later-born cohorts in fluid intelligence measures are widely documented for young adults. In the current study, we quantify such trends in old age using data from highly comparable participants living in a narrowly defined geographical area and examine whether these trends ...
2015| Denis Gerstorf, Gizem Hülür, Johanna Drewelies, Peter Eibich, Sandra Duezel, Ilja Demuth, Paolo Ghisletta, Elisabeth Steinhagen-Thiessen, Gert G. Wagner, Ulman Lindenberger
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SOEPpapers 737 / 2015
Indirect psychological effects induced by crime are likely to contribute significantly to the total costs of crime beyond the financial costs of direct victimization. Using detailed crime statistics for the whole of Germany and linking them to individual-level mental health information from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we analyze whether local crime rates affect the mental health of residents. ...
2015| Daniel Avdic, Christian Bünnings
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SOEPpapers 736 / 2015
This paper compiles a multidimensional poverty index for Germany. Drawing on the capability approach as conceptual framework, I apply the Alkire-Foster method using German panel data. I suggest new operationalizations for two dimensions: social participation and practical reason, the latter drawing on recent findings in experimental economics. The results are consistent with earlier findings, but also ...
2015| Nicolai Suppa
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SOEPpapers 735 / 2015
In this paper, we use SOEP data to explore whether parents’ employment has an extra effect on the school achievement of their children, beyond the well‐established effects of education, income and demography. First, we test whether the source of income or parents’ unemployment determine children’s school achievements. Second, we analyze the effect of job prestige and factors of societal engagement ...
2015| Christina Boll, Malte Hoffmann