SOEPpapers

Parental Leave Policies and Child Care Time in Couples after Childbirth

This research explores how different parental leave reforms in West Germany impacted on the time mothers and fathers in couples spent on child care. I investigate indirect effects through mothers' labor market return decisions more in detail than previous studies and also examine potential direct associations of reforms of the leave period and benefits with maternal and paternal care time. The analysis ...

Educational Choice and Risk Aversion: How Important Is Structural vs. Individual Risk Aversion?

According to sociological theories on educational choice, risk aversion is the main driving force for class-specific educational decisions. Families from upper social classes have to opt for the academically most demanding, long-lasting courses to avoid an intergenerational status loss. Families from lower social classes by contrast, tend instead to opt for shorter tracks to reduce the risk of failing ...

Does Job Loss Make You Smoke and Gain Weight?

This paper estimates the effect of involuntary job loss on smoking behavior and body weight using German Socio-Economic Panel Study data. Baseline nonsmokers are more likely to start smoking due to job loss, while smokers do not intensify their smoking. Job loss increases body weight slightly, but significantly. In particular, single individuals as well as those with lower health or socioeconomic status ...

Impatience among Preschool Children and Their Mothers

Using experimental data of children and their mothers, this paper explores the intergenerational relationship of impatience. The child's impatience stems from a delay of gratification experiment. Mother's impatience has been assessed by a choice task where the mothers faced trade-offs between a smaller-sooner and a larger-later monetary reward with a delay of six or twelve months. The findings demonstrate ...

The Happy Artist? An Empirical Application of the Work-Preference Model

The artistic labor market is marked by several adversities, such as low wages, above-average unemployment, and constrained underemployment. Nevertheless, it attracts many young people. The number of students exceeds the available jobs by far. A potential explanation for this puzzle is that artistic work might result in exceptionally high job satisfaction, a conjecture that has been mentioned at various ...

Erwerbsverläufe und Alterseinkünfte im Paar- und Haushaltskontext

Gefühlte Unsicherheit: Deprivationsängste und Abstiegssorgen der Bevölkerung in Deutschland

The question of what our economy and standard of living will look like in the future is a topic that concerns many today. This article deals with expectations for the future in the German population with regard to economic prosperity and social risks. It seeks to assess the prevalence of concerns about economic prosperity and fears of falling into precarious economic situations among the German population. ...

Asymptotic Income Distribution in the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP): Income Inequality and Darwinian Fitness

In this paper, the relation between income inequality and population growth is analized from a Darwinian perspective. A Markov chain population growth model is presented and estimated using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). We estimate both population growth rates and steady-state income distribution for males and females. The results are compatible with the traditional age-based population ...

The Effect of Relative Standing on Considerations about Self-Employment

This paper uses unique German data to examine the effects of the relative standing on the individual propensity to become self-employed in the next two years. The results suggest that the relationship between relative wage positions and propensity to become self-employed is U-shaped. This is interpreted as evidence that low status translates into entrepreneurial motivation for workers in low relative ...

Multidimensional Well-Being at the Top: Evidence for Germany

This paper employs a multidimensional approach for the measurement of well-being at the top of the distribution using German SOEP micro data. Besides income as traditional indicator for material well-being, we include health as a proxy for nonmaterial quality of life as well as self-reported satisfaction with life as dimensions. We find that one third of the German population is well-off in at least ...

Work Hours Constraints and Health

The issue of whether employees who work more hours than they want to suffer adverse health consequences is important not only at the individual level but also for governmental formation of work time policy. Our study investigates this question by analyzing the impact of the discrepancy between actual and desired work hours on self-perceived health outcomes in Germany and the United Kingdom. Based on ...

In Absolute or Relative Terms? How Framing Prices Affects the Consumer Price Sensitivity of Health Plan Choice

This paper provides field evidence on (a) how price framing affects consumers' decision to switch health insurance plans and (b) how the price elasticity of demand for health insurance can be influenced by policymakers through simple regulatory efforts. In 2009, in order to foster competition among health insurance companies, German federal regulation required health insurance companies to express ...

Maternal Labor Market Return, Parental Leave Policies, and Gender Inequality in Housework

This study investigates how the duration of the work interruption and the labor market status of mothers upon their return affect the division of housework in couples after a birth. By observing several parental leave policy reforms in Britain and West-Germany, this research also explores how extended leave entitlements for mothers influence the division of housework. The analysis uses multilevel multiprocess ...

You Don't Know What You've Got till It's Gone! Unemployment and Intertemporal Changes in Self-Reported Life Satisfaction

This paper uses concurrently and - for the first time - retrospectively reported life satisfaction from the 1984 to 1987 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel to study the importance of different comparison standards for the empirical correlation of unemployment and subjective life satisfaction. It is found that unemployed individuals do not only report significantly lower concurrent satisfaction, ...

Smoking and Returns to Education: Empirical Evidence for Germany

Looking at smoking-behavior it can be shown that there are differences concerning the time-preference-rate. Therefore this has an effect on the optimal schooling decision in the way that we assume a lower average human capital level for smokers. According to a higher time-preference-rate we suppose a higher return to education for smokers who go further on education. With our empirical fondings we ...

Redistribution and Insurance in the German Welfare State

Welfare states redistribute both between individuals reducing annual inequality and over the life-cycle insuring against income risks. But studies measuring redistribution often focus only on a one-year period. Using German SOEP data from 1984 to 2009, long-term inequality over a 20-year period is computed and then decomposed into an inter- and intra-individual component. Results show that annual inequality ...

Selbständigkeit von Personen mit Migrationshintergrund in Deutschland: Ursachen ethnischer Unternehmung

Self-Employment and Geographical Mobility in Germany

Little is known about the individual location behaviour of self-employed entrepreneurs. This paper investigates the geographical mobility behaviour of self-employed entrepreneurs, as compared to employees, thereby shedding new light onto the place embeddedness of self-employment. It examines whether self-employed entrepreneurs are "rooted" in place and also whether those who are more rooted in place ...

Ethnic Residential Segregation and Immigrants' Perceptions of Discrimination in West Germany

Using survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, this study shows that immigrants living in segregated residential areas are more likely to report discrimination because of their ethnic background. This applies to both segregated areas where most neighbors are immigrants from the same country of origin as the surveyed person and segregated areas where most neighbors are immigrants from other ...

So Far so Good: Age, Happiness, and Relative Income

In a simple 2-period model of relative income under uncertainty, higher comparison income for the younger cohort can signal higher or lower expected lifetime relative income, and hence either increase or decrease well-being. With data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and the British Household Panel Survey, we first confirm the standard negative effects of comparison income on life satisfaction ...