SOEPpapers

Revisiting the Income-Health Nexus: The Importance of Choosing the "Right" Indicator

We show that the choice of the welfare measure has a substantial impact on the degree of welfare-related health inequality. Combining various income and wealth measures with different health measures, we calculate 80 health concentration indices. The influence of the welfare measure is more pronounced when using subjective health measures than when using objective health measures.

Benford's Law As an Instrument for Fraud Detection in Surveys Using the Data of the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)

This paper focuses on fraud detection in surveys using Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) data as an example for testing newly methods proposed here. A statistical theorem referred to as Benford's Law states that in many sets of numerical data, the significant digits are not uniformly distributed, as one might expect, but rather adhere to a certain logarithmic probability function. To detect fraud we derive ...

Does Immigration Weaken Natives' Support for the Welfare State? Evidence from Germany

Using data from the 1997 and 2002 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel and from official statistics, I study whether natives are less supportive of state help for the unemployed in regions where the share of foreigners among the unemployed is high. Unlike previous studies, I use individual-level panel data, which allows a more convincing identification of a causal effect. I find that the negative ...

Inequality Aversion and Risk Attitudes

Using self reported measures of life satisfaction and risk attitudes, we empirically test whether there is a relationship between individuals inequality and risk aversion. The empirical analysis uses the German SOEP household panel for the years 1997 to 2007 to conclude that the negative effect of inequality measured by the sample gini coefficient by year and federal state is larger for those individuals ...

Obesity and Happiness

This paper provides insight on the relationship between obesity and happiness. Using the latest available cross sectional data from Germany (GSOEP 2006), UK (BHPS 2005), and Australia (HILDA 2007). We examine whether there is evidence on the impact of overweight on subjective well being. The Hausman test is employed in the univariate and multivariate specifications chosen and reveals evidence for the ...

A Detailed Decomposition of Changes in Wage Inequality in Reunified Post-transition Germany 1999-2006: Accounting for Sample Selection

In this article, I analyze the changes in wage inequality in the eastern region, western region and reunified Germany a decade after reunification. For that purpose, I use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel for the period 1999 - 2006, and implement the decomposition methodologies of Fields (2003) and Yun (2006). I find that during the sub-period 1999-2002 each of the characteristics effect, ...

Women between Part-Time and Full-Time Work: The Influence of Changing Hours of Work on Happiness and Life-Satisfaction

This paper asks whether part-time work makes women happy. Previous research on labour supply has assumed that as workers freely choose their optimal working hours on the basis of their innate preferences and the hourly wage rate, outcome reflects preference. This paper tests this assumption by measuring the impact of changes in working-hours on life satisfaction in two countries (the UK and Germany ...

Exemplarische Integration raumrelevanter Indikatoren auf Basis von "Fernerkundungsdaten" in das Sozio-oekonomische Panel (SOEP)

This paper demonstrates spatial evaluation methods on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study using geo-coordinates and spatially relevant indicators from remote sensing data. By geocoding the addresses of private households (while not identifying them by name and while guaranteeing their complete anonymity) with block-level geographic precision, respondents' data can now be analyzed ...

Interrelationships among Locus of Control and Years in Management and Unemployment: Differences by Gender

This paper focuses on gender differences in the role played by locus of control within a model that predicts outcomes for men and women at two opposite poles of the labour market: high level managerial / leadership positions and unemployment. 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 ...

Measuring Income in Household Panel Surveys for Germany: A Comparison of EU-SILC and SOEP

Empirical analyses of economic inequality, poverty, and mobility in Germany are, to an increas-ing extent, using microdata from the German Federal Statistical Office's contribution to the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) as well as data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). In addition to their significance for national reporting, the EU-SILC data are of great ...

The Optimal Choice of a Reference Standard for Income Comparisons: Indirect Evidence from Immigrants' Return Visits

I propose two new tests of Falk and Knell's (2004) prediction that individuals' reference income increases with ability. To overcome the difficulty that the reference incomeis not observed in existing large data sets, I extend Falk and Knell's model to establish a link between immigrants' reference income and their return visits to their countries of origin. I derive the (arguably counter-intuitive) ...

Screening, Competition, and Job Design: Economic Origins of Good Jobs

In recent decades, many firms offered more discretion to their employees, often increasing the productivity of effort but also leaving more opportunities for shirking. These "high-performance work systems" are difficult to understand in terms of standard moral hazard models. We show experimentally that complementarities between high effort discretion, rent-sharing, screening opportunities, and competition ...

Years of Schooling, Human Capital and the Body Mass Index of European Females

We find that the protective effect of years of schooling on the BMI of European females is non negligible, but smaller than the one recently found for the US. By using individual standardized cognitive tests instead of years of schooling as the measure of education we show that the current focus in the literature on years of schooling is not misplaced. We also investigate whether the response to changes ...

You Can't Be Happier Than Your Wife: Happiness Gaps and Divorce

This paper asks whether the gap in subjective happiness between spouses matters per se, i.e. whether it predicts divorce. We use three panel databases to explore this question. Controlling for the level of life satisfaction of spouses, we find that a higher satisfaction gap, even in the first year of marriage, increases the likelihood of a future separation. We interpret this as the effect of comparisons ...

Zum 'Warum' und 'Wie' der Erhebung von (genetischen) 'Biomarkern' in sozialwissenschaftlichen Surveys

Diese Anmerkungen verfolgen zwei bescheidene Ziele: (1.) über den Überblicks-Beitrag von Behrens (2010) hinaus zu verdeutlichen, warum das Erheben von "Biomarkern" bis hin zu "Gen-Informationen" für die Soziologie wichtig ist, und (2.) über erste Erfahrungen bei der Erhebung von Gen-Material in einem bevölkerungsrepräsentativen Survey kurz zu berichten.

Lebenszufriedenheit und Wohlbefinden in Deutschland: Studie zur Konstruktion eines Lebenszufriedenheitsindikators

Zur Konstruktion eines Lebenszufriedenheitsindikators ("Glücks-BIP") für Deutschland

Trotz steigender Wirtschaftsleistung hat sich die Lebenszufriedenheit in Deutschland seit Beginn der 90er Jahre nicht erhöht, in Westdeutschland ist sie sogar gesunken. Mehr materieller Wohlstand bedeutet also nicht automatisch mehr Wohlstand im Sinne von Lebensglück. Was aber sind dann die treibenden "Glücksfaktoren"? Mit diesen Fragen befasst sich die Glücksforschung, ein noch junges Forschungsfeld ...

The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) in the Nineties: An Example of Incremental Innovations in an Ongoing Longitudinal Study

The main aim of the present paper is to historically reappraise the development of the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) in the 1990s after the first six waves had been collected. This development was closely connected to the opening of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe and the fall of the Wall separating the two German states. In addition to its relevance for the SOEP, this study is also of ...

Wohlstandspolarisierung, Verteilungskonflikte und Ungleichheitswahrnehmungen in Deutschland

The connections between the polarization of living conditions, social conflicts concerning the distribution of resources and the perception of social inequality in Germany will be picked out as a central theme. By means of empirical findings it becomes clear that the degree of inequality and polarization with respect to the living conditions - both measured by the wellbeing indicator income - has increased ...

Subjektive und objektive Lebenslagen von Arbeitslosen

Das Diskussionspapier thematisiert die objektive und subjektive Lebenslage von Arbeitslosen in Deutschland im Vergleich zur Gesamtbevölkerung. Die Ergebnisse indizieren eine deutlich schlechtere materielle, d. h. objektive Lebenslage der Arbeitslosen. Dies reflektiert sich in den auf Wohlstandskategorien bezogenen subjektivenIndikatoren, weniger aber in den Bewertungen immaterieller Wohlfahrtskategorien. ...