Publikationen mit SOEP-Daten: SOEPlit

Ausgewählte Kommentare

The impact of urban-rural residents’ life quality gap on the cultivated land transfer

Cultivated land transfer serves as an efficient way to mitigate the escalating issue of cultivated land abandonment due to labor migration driven by the urban-rural gap, while also ensuring national food security. Nevertheless, the impact of how urban-rural resident’ life quality gap (RLQG) affect cultivated land transfer decision-making remains unclear. This study developed a theoretical framework ...

Preference-Driven Contract Design: How Education Alters Risk, Patience, and Effort in Incentive Schemes

Performance-contingent pay raises productivity, yet in the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) only about 16% of workers report receiving performance pay, with the incidence being roughly seven percentage points higher among university graduates than among non-graduates. This coexistence of low aggregate take-up and a strong skill gradient is puzzling. This paper accounts for these twin facts with a ...

The Rise in Absenteeism in 2022 Is Only Partly Due to Electronic Sick Notes

In Germany, employee absences due to illness rose sharply, particularly in 2022. Various sources argue that the introduction of the electronic certificate of incapacity for work (eAU) caused this. Official data previously did not include absences that were not reported to health insurance providers; since the introduction of the eAU, this is no longer the case. This gap does not exist in Socio-Economic ...

Inequality of Opportunity in Wealth: Levels, Trends and Drivers in Germany

This paper studies inequality of opportunity (IOp) in individual net wealth in Germany from 2002 to 2019 using the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Applying the ex-ante IOp framework, we quantify the share of wealth inequality attributable to immutable circumstances and benchmark it against IOp in gross labour earnings. Relative IOp in net wealth is high?slightly above one half of total wealth inequality?and ...

Navigating uncertainty: Do communicable diseases influence risk preferences?

This paper explores the effect of COVID-19 infection rates on individuals’ risk preferences using the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), a large population-wide random sample. Exploiting county-level variation in a difference-in-differences design, we find that risk preferences remain unchanged: the effect is precisely estimated at 2.1% of a standard deviation (95% CI: [−0.4%, +4.6%]), ruling out economically ...

Climate Concerns Are Increasingly Affecting Germans

Climate change triggers anxiety in many people. Concerns about the consequences of climate change vary significantly not just by age and generation but also over time. Using German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) data, this Weekly Report examines the extent to which these differences stem from age-related effects, generational socialization, or year-specific events. The results show that climate concerns ...

From Cycles to Spirals: Rethinking Longitudinal Survey Design

Longitudinal surveys play a central role in social science research and policy advice but increasing demands for timely data pose substantial challenges for managing time, resources, and data quality across survey waves. While the Survey Life Cycle (SLC) provides a well established framework for organizing survey production, it is primarily geared toward single wave studies and offers limited guidance ...

The Effect of Parenthood on Health Lifestyles: A Longitudinal Analysis Using Data from the German Socio-Economic Panel

Parenthood has been linked to changes in health-related behavior, though studies have reported mixed findings on whether these changes are beneficial or harmful. To date, most research has focused on associations between parenthood and individual health behaviors, while research on the association with overall health lifestyles is limited. This study investigates how health lifestyles change following ...

Stratified Equality of Opportunity in the German Education System: Evidence from the SOEP-G Data

The intergenerational transmission of educational attainment remains a key mechanism through which social inequalities are reproduced. While sociological research has long emphasized environmental influences, recent research shows that genetic differences are also relevant to educational attainment, as well as socially contingent in their influences. Using the effects of a polygenic score for educational ...