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SOEPpapers 154 / 2008
In recent years, many social scientists have claimed that trust plays an important role in economic and social transactions. Despite its proposed importance, the measurement and the definition of trust seem to be not fully settled, and the identification of the exact role of trust in economic interactions has proven to be elusive. It is still not clear whether trust is just an epiphenomenon of good ...
2008| Ernst Fehr
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SOEPpapers 153 / 2008
The social norm of unemployment suggests that aggregate unemployment reduces the wellbeing of the employed, but has a far smaller effect on the unemployed. We use German panel data to reproduce this standard result, but then suggest that the appropriate distinction may not be between employment and unemployment, but rather between higher and lower levels of labour-market security. Those with good job ...
2008| Andrew Clark, Andreas Knabe, Steffen Rätzel
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SOEPpapers 152 / 2008
This paper analyzes the mobility between self-employment, wage employment and non-employment. Using data for men in West Germany, we find strong true state dependence in all three states. Moreover, compared to wage employment, non-employment increases the probability of self-employment significantly, and selfemployment goes along with a higher risk of future non-employment.
2008| Marco Caliendo, Arne Uhlendorff
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SOEPpapers 151 / 2008
Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Survey (SOEP), this paper assesses the relationship between life satisfaction and religious practice. The main new result here is longitudinal. It is shown that individuals who become more religious over time record long term gains in life satisfaction, while those who become less religious record long term losses. This result holds net of the effects ...
2008| Bruce Headey, Jürgen Schupp, Ingrid Tucci, Gert G. Wagner
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SOEPpapers 150 / 2008
This paper discusses how household panels in general - and the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) in particular - can serve as reference data for researchers collecting datasets that do not represent the full universe of the population of interest (e.g., through clinical trials, intervention studies, laboratory and behavioural experiments, and cohort studies). We first discuss potential benefits of ...
2008| Thomas Siedler, Jürgen Schupp, C. Katharina Spieß, Gert G. Wagner
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SOEPpapers 149 / 2008
This paper provides evidence that subjective measures of individual well being can be used to study the impact of income uncertainty from an ex ante point of view. Two different measures of subjective well being are under study: Satisfaction with household income and the income evaluation question as developed by Van Praag. It can be shown that satisfaction with income is more affected by ex ante than ...
2008| Johannes Schwarze
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SOEPpapers 148 / 2008
We extend the literature on transition economies' wage structures by investigating the returns to tenure and experience. This study applies recent panel data and estimation approaches that control for hitherto neglected biases. We compare the life cycle structure in East and West German wages for fulltime employed men in the private sector. The patterns in the returns to seniority are similar for the ...
2008| Robert Orlowski, Regina T. Riphahn
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SOEPpapers 147 / 2008
This paper analyses immigrants' access to health care and utilisation of health care services in Germany. Thereby, it is investigated if there is inequity in access to or in the utilisation of health care services due to a lack of language skills or due to a lack of information about the health care system (approximated by years since migration)among first- and secondgeneration immigrants. The data ...
2008| Monika Sander
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SOEPpapers 146 / 2008
This article describes how the German Socio-Economic Panel longitudinal study project developed over the years 1983 to 1989, a period when practical experience was being gathered with the first six waves and when the further funding for this large-scale project was a constant issue. During this time, a series of basic features were established that have made this panel study an example to others - ...
2008| Ute Hanefeld, Jürgen Schupp
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SOEPpapers 145 / 2008
I define wellbeing as preference realization. Wellbeing can be measured with affective (the amount of pleasant versus unpleasant experiences) and cognitive (satisfaction with life in general and life domains) measures. Since its inception 25 years ago, the SOEP has included cognitive measures of wellbeing. In 2007, the SOEP included four items (happy, sad, angry, afraid) as an affective measure of ...
2008| Ulrich Schimmack
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SOEPpapers 144 / 2008
Dieser Beitrag widmet sich der systematischen empirischen Analyse des Einflusses von Religion auf Sozialkapital in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Als abhängige Variablen werden neben der Einbindung in formelle Netzwerke zivilgesellschaftlichen Engagements und informelle Freundschafts- und Verwandtschaftsnetzwerke auch deren identitäts- und statusüberbrückenden Potentiale berücksichtigt. Die auf der ...
2008| Richard Traunmüller
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SOEPpapers 143 / 2008
Female labor market activity is dependent on the presence and the age of a child, but how do the determinants develop in magnitude and significance with the child's age? Using German SOEP data from 1991 to 2006 for mothers with young children, the change in maternal labor supply when the child is one, two, and three years old is explicitly addressed. According to the tobit regression results for precise ...
2008| Katrin Sommerfeld
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SOEPpapers 142 / 2008
Understanding the sources of individual differences beyond social and economic effects has become a research area of growing interest in psychology, sociology, and economics. A quantitative genetic research design provides the necessary tools for this type of analysis. For a state-of-the-art approach, multigroup data is required. Household panel studies, such as BHPS (Understanding Society) in the ...
2008| Frank M. Spinath
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SOEPpapers 141 / 2008
Deductibles in health insurance are often regarded as a means to contain health care costs when individuals exhibit moral hazard. However, in the absence of moral hazard, voluntarily chosen deductibles may instead lead to self-selection into different insurance contracts. We use a set of new variables in the German Socioeconomic Panel for the years 2002, 2004, and 2006 that measure individual health ...
2008| Hendrik Schmitz
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SOEPpapers 140 / 2008
We analyse preferences for public, private or mixed provision of childcare theoretically and empirically. We model childcare as a publicly provided private good. Richer households should prefer private provision to either pure public or mixed provision. If public provision redistributes from rich to poor, they should favour mixed over pure public provision, but if public provision redistributes from ...
2008| Rainald Borck, Katharina Wrohlich
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SOEPpapers 139 / 2008
There is by now a vast number of studies which document a sharp increase in crosssectional wage inequality during the 2000s. It is often assumed that this inequality is of a "permanent nature" which in turn is used as an argument calling for government intervention. We examine these claims using a fully balanced panel of full-time employed individuals in Germany from the German Socio-Economic Panel ...
2008| Michal Myck, Richard Ochmann, Salmai Qari
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SOEPpapers 138 / 2008
It is becoming more and more important to be highly skilled in order to integrate successfully into the labor market. Highly skilled workers receive higher wages and face a lower risk of becoming unemployed, compared to poorly qualified workers. We analyze the determinants of successful high school graduation in Germany. As our main database, we use the youth file of GSOEP for the period extending ...
2008| Benjamin Balsmeier, Heiko Peters
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SOEPpapers 137 / 2008
The accumulation of the human capital stock plays a key role to explain the macroeconomic performance across regions. However, despite the strong theoretical support for this claim, empirical evidence has been not very convincing, probably because of the low quality of the data. This paper provides a robustness analysis of alternative measures of human capital available at the level of EU NUTS1 and ...
2008| Christian Dreger, Georg Erber, Daniela Glocker
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SOEPpapers 136 / 2008
We present a sorting model in which workers with greater ability and greater risk tolerance move into performance pay jobs and contrast it with the classic agency model of performance pay. Estimates from the German Socio-Economic Panel confirm testable implications drawn from our sorting model. First, prior to controlling for earnings, workers in performance pay jobs have higher job satisfaction, a ...
2008| Thomas Cornelißen, John S. Heywood, Uwe Jirjahn
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SOEPpapers 135 / 2008
We discuss a new approach to specifying and estimating ordered probit models with endogenous switching, or with binary endogenous regressor, based on copula functions. These models provide a framework of analysis for self-selection in economic well-being equations, where assigment of regressors may be choice based, resulting from well-being maximization, rather than random. In an application to public ...
2008| Simon Luechinger, Alois Stutzer, Rainer Winkelmann