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SOEPpapers 414 / 2011
Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we estimate the variation of subjective well-being experienced by Germans over the last two decades testing the role of some of the major correlates of people's well-being. Our results suggest that the variation of Germans' well-being between 1996 and 2007 is well predicted by changes over time of income, demographics and social capital. ...
2011| Stefano Bartolini, Ennio Bilancini, Francesco Sarracino
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SOEPpapers 413 / 2011
Based on the notion that entrepreneurship is a 'local event' , the literature argues that selfemployed workers and entrepreneurs are 'rooted' in place. This paper tests the 'residential rootedness'-hypothesis of self-employment by examining for Germany and the UK whether the self-employed are less likely to move or migrate than employees. Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-economic Panel ...
2011| Darja Reuschke, Maarten Van Ham
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SOEPpapers 412 / 2011
This study investigates whether the willingness to take income risks revealed by occupational choice is transmitted from parents to their children. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we find that fathers' riskiness of job is a significant determinant of children's occupational risk, in particular sons' (excluding parent-child pairs with identical occupations). This is the first ...
2011| Andrea Leuermann, Sarah Necker
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SOEPpapers 411 / 2011
Extending the traditional income poverty concept by multidimensional poverty has been of growing interest within the last years. This paper contributes with an analysis of interdepend-ent multidimensional (IMD) poverty intensity of time and income, which in particular restricts social participation. The interdependency of the multiple poverty dimensions under a strong (union approach) and weak focus ...
2011| Joachim Merz, Tim Rathjen
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SOEPpapers 410 / 2011
Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, this study examines the relationship between immigrant residential segregation and immigrants' satisfaction with the neighborhood. The estimates show that immigrants living in segregated areas are less satisfied with the neighborhood. This is consistent with the hypothesis that housing discrimination rather than self-selection plays an important role ...
2011| Verena Dill, Uwe Jirjahn, Georgi Tsertvadze
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SOEPpapers 409 / 2011
Using a unique dataset for Germany that links individual longitudinal data from the SOEP to regional data from the federal employment agency and data of real estate prices, we evaluate the impact of neighborhood unemployment on individual employment propects. The panel setup and richness of the data allows us to overcome some of the identification problems which are present in this strand of literature. ...
2011| Thomas K. Bauer, Michael Fertig, Matthias Vorell
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SOEPpapers 408 / 2011
This paper extends the idea of using ex-ante risk measures in a model of precautionary savings by explicitly simulating future net-income risks. The uncertainty measure takes into account the interdependency of labour market status and health. The model is estimated for prime age males using the German Socio-Economic Panel Study for years 2001-2007. The empirical analysis is conducted using a measure ...
2011| Johannes Geyer
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SOEPpapers 407 / 2011
Die Heterogenität der zugewanderten Bevölkerung in Deutschland spielt bei der Analyse migrations- und integrationsbezogener Fragen eine wachsende Rolle. Seit der Welle Y ist im Sozio-oekonomischen Panel (SOEP) die Variable MIGBACK enthalten, welche die Identifikation des Migrationsstatus der Befragten ermöglicht. Empirisch werden, z. B. bei der Arbeitsmarktintegration, zusätzlich zu Unterschieden zwischen ...
2011| Friedrich Scheller
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SOEPpapers 406 / 2011
In the early half of the twentieth century in West Germany the male breadwinner model was dominant with men playing the provider role and women staying at home and taking care of children. The employment of mothers was not a common practice, so that they only worked due to the financial situation of the family or at least justified their labor market activity that way. The present paper deals with ...
2011| Nadiya Kelle
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SOEPpapers 405 / 2011
We use the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to show that personal relationships which individuals maintain for non-economic reasons can be an important determinant of regional economic growth. We show that West German households who have social ties to East Germany in 1989 experience a persistent rise in their personal incomes after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Moreover, the presence of these households ...
2011| Konrad B. Burchardi, Tarek A. Hassan
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SOEPpapers 404 / 2011
Although spiteful preferences play a crucial role in the development of human large-scale cooperation, there is little evidence on spiteful behavior and its determinants in children. We investigate the relationship between children's cognitive skills and spiteful behavior in a sample of 214 preschoolers aged 5-6 and their mothers. Other-regarding behavior of both mothers and children is elicited through ...
2011| Elisabeth Bügelmayer, C. Katharina Spieß
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SOEPpapers 403 / 2011
This article critically examines the theoretical arguments that underlie the literature linking personality traits to economic outcomes and provides empirical evidence indicating that labour market outcomes influence personality outcomes. Based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we investigated the extent to which gender differences occur in the processes by which highly positive and negative ...
2011| Eileen Trzcinski, Elke Holst
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SOEPpapers 402 / 2011
Using unique survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, this study examines the influence of reciprocal inclinations on workers' sorting into codetermined firms. Employees with strong negative reciprocal inclinations are more likely to work in firms with a works council while employees with strong positive reciprocal inclinations are less likely to work in such firms. We argue that these findings ...
2011| Uwe Jirjahn, Vanessa Lange
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SOEPpapers 401 / 2011
The discussion paper examines sensitivity influences on the German personal income distribution in a time-series perspective and in a methodically broad manner. The author spins on the following "adjusting screws" of distributional analyses: (1) different kinds of equivalence scales, (2) different demarcations of income areas (in the sense of social classes), (3) different inequality indicators, and ...
2011| Jürgen Faik
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SOEPpapers 400 / 2011
Sport zur Gesundheitsbeeinflussung ist in westlichen Industriegesellschaften ein gesellschaftlich akzeptiertes Mittel. Da jedoch die meisten existierenden Studien auf Querschnittdaten beruhen, lassen sich auf der Grundlage dieser Studien keine kausalen Aussagen zur komplexen Wechselwirkung von Sport und Gesundheit treffen. Es stellt sich also die Frage, ob Sportler gesünder sind, weil sie Sport treiben ...
2011| Simone Becker
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SOEPpapers 399 / 2011
Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 1984-2009, we follow persons from their working life into their retirement years and find that, on average, employed people maintain their life satisfaction upon retirement, while long-term unemployed people report a substantial increase in their life satisfaction when they retire. These results are robust to controlling for changes in other life ...
2011| Clemens Hetschko, Andreas Knabe, Ronnie Schöb
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SOEPpapers 398 / 2011
Self-reported measures of health are generally treated as weak measures of respondents' objective health status. On the other hand, most surveys use self-reported health to measure health status and to determine the effects of a range of other socio-economic characteristics of the local environment on individual health. It is therefore of interest to the public health research community to verify the ...
2011| Jens Ambrasat, Jürgen Schupp, Gert G. Wagner
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SOEPpapers 397 / 2011
The idea of higher wealth taxes to finance the mounting public debt in the wake of the financial crises is gaining ground in several OECD countries. We evaluate the revenue and distributional effects of a one-time capital levy on personal net wealth that is currently on the German political agenda. We use survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and estimate the net wealth distribution ...
2011| Stefan Bach, Martin Beznoska, Viktor Steiner
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SOEPpapers 396 / 2011
How can public pension systems be reformed to ensure fiscal stability in the face of increasing life expectancy? To address this pressing open question in public finance, we estimate a life-cycle model in which the optimal employment, retirement and consumption decisions of forward-looking individuals depend, inter alia, on life expectancy and the design of the public pension system. We calculate that, ...
2011| Peter Haan, Victoria Prowse
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SOEPpapers 395 / 2011
Previous estimates of unfair inequality of opportunity (IOp) are only lower bounds because of the unobservability of the full set of endowed circumstances beyond the sphere of individual responsibility. In this paper, we suggest a new estimator based on a fixed effects panel model which additionally allows identifying an upper bound. We illustrate our approach by comparing Germany and the US based ...
2011| Judith Niehues, Andreas Peichl