SOEPpapers

Continuous Training, Job Satisfaction and Gender: An Empirical Analysis Using German Panel Data

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), this paper analyzes the relationship between training and job satisfaction focusing in particular on gender differences. Controlling for a variety of socio-demographic, job and firm characteristics, we find a difference between males and females in the correlation of training with job satisfaction which is positive for males but insignificant ...

Does Unemployment Hurt Less if There Is More of It Around? A Panel Analysis of Life Satisfaction in Germany and Switzerland

This paper examines the existence of a habituation effect to unemployment: Do the unemployed suffer less from job loss if unemployment is more widespread, if their own unemployment lasts longer and if unemployment is a recurrent experience? The underlying idea is that unemployment hysteresis may operate through a sociological channel: if many people in the community lose their job and remain unemployed ...

Surfing Alone? The Internet and Social Capital: Evidence from an Unforeseen Technological Mistake

Does the Internet undermine social capital or facilitate inter-personal and civic engagement in the real world? Merging unique telecommunication data with geo-coded German individual-level data, we investigate how broadband Internet affects several dimensions of social capital. One identification strategy uses panel information to estimate value-added models. A second exploits a quasi-experiment in ...

The Double German Transformation: Changing Male Employment Patterns in East and West Germany

Before the 90s, men's employment careers in East and West Germany were quite similar, despite their widely differing institutional settings. Before reunification, employment biographies were mainly dominated by full-time employment in both East and West. After 1989 the GDR was incorporated into the Federal Republic of Germany and almost all East German institutions were supplanted by adapted West German ...

Measuring Time Use in Surveys: How Valid Are Time Use Questions in Surveys? Concordance of Survey and Experience Sampling Measures

Since it is still unclear to what extent time allocation retrospectively reported in questionnaires, reflects people's actual behavior, examining the accuracy of responses to time use survey questions is of crucial importance. We analyze the congruence of time use information assessed through retrospective questionnaires and through experience sampling methodology. The sample comprised 433 individuals ...

Population Aging and Individual Attitudes toward Immigration: Disentangling Age, Cohort and Time Effects

In the face of rising old-age dependency ratios in industrialized countries like Germany, politicians and their electorates discuss the loosening of immigration policies as one policy option to ensure the sustainability of public social security systems. The question arises whether this policy option is feasible in aging countries: older individuals are typically found to be more averse to immigration. ...

Arbeitszufriedenheit und Persönlichkeit: "Wer schaffen will, muss fröhlich sein!"

The research on job satisfaction has a long history and is one of the most intensively studied subjects - not only in the field of industrial and organizational psychology. The various studies can roughly be classified into situational, dispositional, and hybrid approaches, depending on whether working conditions, personality traits or their interaction are emphasized as determinants. So far, only ...

Regional Unemployment and Norm-Induced Effects on Life Satisfaction

While rising unemployment generally reduces people's happiness, researchers argue that there is a compensating social-norm effect for the unemployed individual, who might suffer less when it is more common to be unemployed. This empirical study, however, rejects this thesis for German panel data and finds individual unemployment to be even more hurtful when aggregate unemployment is higher. On the ...

Using Geographically Referenced Data on Environmental Exposures for Public Health Research: A Feasibility Study Based on the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP)

Background: In panel datasets information on environmental exposures is scarce. Thus, our goal was to probe the use of area-wide geographically referenced data for air pollution from an external data source in the analysis of physical health. Methods: The study population comprised SOEP respondents in 2004 merged with exposures for NO2, PM10 and O3 based on a multi-year reanalysis of the EURopean Air ...

Capabilities and Choices: Do They Make Sen'se for Understanding Objective and Subjective Well-Being? An Empirical Test of Sen's Capability Framework on German and British Panel Data

In Sen's Capability Approach (CA) well-being can be defined as the freedom of choice to achieve the things in life which one has reason to value most for his or her personal life. Capabilities are in Sen's vocabulary therefore the real freedoms people have or the opportunities available to them. In this paper we examine the impact of capabilities alongside choices on subjective and objective well-being. ...

The Effect of Subsidized Employment on Happiness

While a large body of evidence suggests that unemployment and self-reported happiness are negatively correlated, it is not clear whether this reflects a causal effect of unemployment on happiness and whether subsidized employment can increase the happiness of the unemployed. To close this gap, this paper estimates the causal effect of a type of subsidized employment projects - Germany's Arbeitsbeschaffungsmaßnahmen ...

A Behaviouristic Approach for Measuring Poverty: The Decomposition Approach ; Empirical Illustrations for Germany 1995-2009

In this paper an alternative approach with regard to poverty measurement is discussed: the so-called decomposition approach. This method differentiates between various social groups in the sense that for each group a separate poverty line is determined. E. g., household size might be a criterion for such a social differentiation. By doing this, the problem of traditional poverty measurement to refer ...

Behind the Curtain: The Within-Household Sharing of Income

The distribution of personal income in a society depends strongly on the within-household distribution of income. Nevertheless, little is known about this phenomenon. I analyze the sharing of income among household partners from a welfare economic perspective. Measures of financial satisfaction for both household partners are used to gain information about the within-household distribution of income-induced ...

Health Effects on Children's Willingness to Compete

The formation of human capital is important for a society's welfare and economic success. Recent literature shows that child health can provide an important explanation for disparities in children's human capital development across different socio-economic groups. While this literature focuses on cognitive skills as determinants of human capital, it neglects non-cognitive skills. We analyze data from ...

Cardiovascular Consequences of Unfair Pay

This paper investigates physiological responses to perceptions of unfair pay. In a simple principal agent experiment agents produce revenue by working on a tedious task. Principals decide how this revenue is allocated between themselves and their agents. In this environment unfairness can arise if an agent's reward expectation is not met. Throughout the experiment we record agents' heart rate variability. ...

Re-engaging with Survey Non-respondents: The BHPS, SOEP and HILDA Survey Experience

Previous research into the correlates and determinants of non-response in longitudinal surveys has focused exclusively on why it is that respondents at one survey wave choose not to participate at future waves. This is very understandable if non-response is always an absorbing state, but in many longitudinal surveys, and certainly most household panels, this is not the case. Indeed, in these surveys ...

Entwicklung der Altersarmut in Deutschland

Stability and Change of Personality across the Life Course: The Impact of Age and Major Life Events on Mean-Level and Rank-Order Stability of the Big Five

Does personality change across the entire life course, and are those changes due to intrinsic maturation or major life experiences? This longitudinal study investigated changes in the mean levels and rank order of the Big Five personality traits in a heterogeneous sample of 14,718 Germans across all of adulthood. Latent change and latent moderated regression models provided four main findings: First, ...

Are Self-Employed Really Happier than Employees? An Approach Modelling Adaptation and Anticipation Effects to Self-Employment and General Job Changes

Empirical analyses using cross-sectional and panel data found significantly higher levels of job satisfaction for self-employed than for employees. We argue that those estimates in previous studies might be biased by neglecting anticipation and adaptation effects. For testing we specify several models accounting for anticipation and adaptation to self-employment and job changes. Based on data from ...

Spillover Effects of Maternal Education on Child's Health and Schooling

This is the first study investigating the causal effect of maternal education on child's health and schooling outcomes in Germany. We apply an instrumental variables approach that has not yet been used in the intergenerational context. For that purpose, we draw on a rich German panel data set (SOEP) containing information about three generations. This allows instrumenting maternal education by the ...