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SOEPpapers 794 / 2015
This paper investigates whether individual control-perception affects the probability of becoming poor, and vice versa, whether poverty experiences can be detrimental to these traits later on. The former relation is intuitive as control related traits underly many idiosyncratic determinants of poverty. Though traits like control-perception are known to stabilize towards adulthood, the latter association ...
2015| Hendrik Thiel, Stephan L. Thomsen
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SOEPpapers 793 / 2015
We use the panel data of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and of the Ukrainian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (ULMS) to investigate whether risk attitudes have primary (exogenous) determinants that are valid in different stages of economic development and in a different structural context, comparing a mature capitalist economy and a transition economy. We then analyze the stability of the risk ...
2015| Thomas Dohmen, Hartmut Lehmann, Norberto Pignatti
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SOEPpapers 792 / 2015
In this paper, we decompose body mass index (BMI) differences between Turkish immigrants and Germans in West Germany for women and men. We focus on isolating the part of BMI differences that can be explained by differences in observed socioeconomic status from the part attributable to differences in coefficients. Our results reveal that female Turkish immigrants are on average more obese than female ...
2015| Rui Dang
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SOEPpapers 791 / 2015
Can moving to an earnings-related parental leave system influence children’s wellbeing and are heterogeneous effects on parents carried over to the entire family, making special groups of children worse off than others? To answer this question, this study exploits a large and unanticipated parental leave reform in Germany as a natural experiment. By replacing a means-tested by an earnings-related system ...
2015| Katrin Huber
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SOEPpapers 790 / 2015
Statistical Analysis in surveys is generally facing missing data. In longitudinal studies for some missing values there might be past or future data points available. The question arises how to successfully transform this advantage into improvedimputation strategies. In a simulation study the authors compare six combinations of cross‐sectional and longitudinal imputation strategies for German wealth ...
2015| Christian Westermeier, Markus M. Grabka
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SOEPpapers 789 / 2015
The author uses large-scale German survey data for the years 2009, 2011 and 2013 in order to analyze the nexus between the individual perception of being unfairly paid and measures for quantity and quality of sleep, namely, hours of sleep during workweek and during weekend, happiness with sleep, and sleep disorders diagnosed by a doctor. Main findings of the regression analysis are that workers, who ...
2015| Christian Pfeifer
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SOEPpapers 788 / 2015
Im Rahmen der Studie „Verbleib und berufliche Orientierung von sächsischen Lehramtsabsolvent_innen in Sachsen (VEBOLAS)“ wurde anhand der SOEP-Daten geprüft, inwiefern die nicht repräsentative Stichprobe von VEBOLAS bezüglich der Persönlichkeitsmerkmale (Big-Five) verzerrt ist. Dies wurde nötig, weil die Befundlage zu den Persönlichkeitsdimensionen Neurotizismus, Extraversion, Offenheit, Verträglichkeit ...
2015| Jörg Eulenberger
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SOEPpapers 787 / 2015
The correct prediction of how alternative states of the world affect our lives is a cornerstone of economics. We study how accurate people are in predicting their future well-being when facing major life events. Based on individual panel data, we compare people's forecast of their life satisfaction in five years' time to their actual realisations later on. This is done after the individuals experience ...
2015| Reto Odermatt, Alois Stutzer
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SOEPpapers 786 / 2015
This paper examines to what extent marital sorting affects cross-sectional earnings inequality in Germany over the past three decades, while explicitly taking into account labor supply choices. Using rich micro data, the observed distribution of couples' earnings is compared to a counterfactual of randomly matched spouses. Hypothetical earnings are predicted based on a structural model of household ...
2015| Nico Pestel
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SOEPpapers 785 / 2015
Germany introduced a new mandatory insurance for long-term care in 1995 as part of its social security system. It replaced a system based on meanstested social welfare. Benefits from the long-term care insurance are not means tested and depend on the required level of care. The insurance provides both benefits in kind and cash benefits. The new scheme improved the situation for households to organize ...
2015| Johannes Geyer, Thorben Korfhage
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SOEPpapers 784 / 2015
Studies of deprivation usually ignore mental illness. This paper uses household panel data from the USA, Australia, Britain and Germany to broaden the analysis. We ask first how many of those in the lowest levels of life-satisfaction suffer from unemployment, poverty, physical ill health, and mental illness. The largest proportion suffer from mental illness. Multiple regression shows that mental illness ...
2015| Sarah Flèche, Richard Layard
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SOEPpapers 783 / 2015
Aims: To investigate cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between personality and smoking, and test whether sociodemographic factors modify these associations.Design: Cross-sectional and longitudinal individual-participant meta-analysis. Setting: Nine cohort studies from Australia, Germany, UK and US. Participants: A total of 79,757 men and women (mean age = 51 years). ...
2015| Christian Hakulinen, Mirka Hintsanen, Marcus R. Munafò, Marianna Virtanen, Mika Kivimäki, G. David Batty, Markus Jokela
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SOEPpapers 782 / 2015
Extending working life is an objective for many nations. However, the UK government has recently reported only modest improvement “compared to many nations”. A comparison of European, Labour Force Surveys show that Germany has reversed early retirement much faster than the UK since 2003. This was not forecast by previous researchers. In particular, Ebbinghaus’ influential cross-national analysis of ...
2015| David Wright
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SOEPpapers 781 / 2015
We study three budget-neutral reforms of the German tax and transfer system designed to improve work incentives for people with low incomes: a feasible flat tax reform that provides a basic income which is equal to the current level of the means tested unemployment benefit, and two alternative reforms that involve employment subsidies to stimulate participation and full-time work, respectively. We ...
2015| Robin Jessen, Davud Rostam-Afschar, Viktor Steiner
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SOEPpapers 780 / 2015
Due to the growing number of people in need of care and the importance of informal caregiving, achieving a work-care balance should be of certain relevance for couples. This work analyses, based on data of the German Socio-Economic Panel, if there are “spill-over” effects from care to work within couples. For the years 2001-2011, it is examined if informal care by women influences the employment of ...
2015| Judith Kaschowitz
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SOEPpapers 779 / 2015
Electricity from renewable sources avoids disadvantages of conventional power generation but often meets with local resistance due to visual, acoustic, and odor nuisance. We use representative panel data on the subjective well-being of 46,678 individuals in Germany, 1994-2012, for identifying and valuing the local externalities from solar, wind and biomass plants in respondents’ postcode area and adjacent ...
2015| Charlotte von Möllendorff, Heinz Welsch
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SOEPpapers 778 / 2015
We document the educational integration of immigrant children with a focus on the link between family size and educational decisions and distinguishing particularly between first- and second-generation immigrants and between source country groups. First, for immigrant adolescents, we show family-size adjusted convergence to almost native levels of higher education track attendance from the first to ...
2015| Dominique Meurs, Patrick A. Puhani, Friederike von Haaren
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SOEPpapers 777 / 2015
Generous income support programs as provided by European welfare states have often been blamed to hamper employment. This paper investigates the importance of incentives inherent in the tax-benefit system for the individual decision to take up work. Using German microdata over the period 1993-2010 we find that recent reforms in Germany increased work incentives at the extensive margin measured by the ...
2015| Charlotte Bartels, Nico Pestel
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SOEPpapers 776 / 2015
This paper investigates the influence of political regimes on personality, using the separation of Germany into the socialist GDR and the democratic FRG and its reunification in 1990 as a natural experiment. We show that there are significant differences between former GDR and FRG residents regarding important attributes of personality (particularly the locus of control, neuroticism, conscientiousness, ...
2015| Tim Friehe, Markus Pannenberg, Michael Wedow
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SOEPpapers 775 / 2015
The German population is ageing due to decreasing birth rates and increasing life expectancy. To sustain the German pension system, legal retirement age is increased step by step to 67 years. This raises questions about how to enable and motivate older individuals to work that long. Hence, it is important to understand whether they represent a homogeneous group that can be addressed through specific ...
2015| Paula Thieme, Dennis A. V. Dittrich