Calendar of SOEP Events

Concerns about inequality and questions of social justice and cohesion have re-entered the public arena and animate debate. In his Nobel prize lecture in 2015, Angus Deaton has outlined three imperatives that are key to understanding inequalities and formulating welfare-enhancing policies: (I) Differences in resources across individuals should be measured not only at specific points in time but ...

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The German Socio-Economic Panel Study is a representative panel study for the German population, collecting data on a broad variety of topics of everyday life, including general well-being, household composition, educational aspirations and educational status, income and occupational biographies, leisure time activities, housing, health, political orientation and more. With its long running panel ...

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Despite millions of war widows worldwide, little is known about the economic consequences of being widowed by war. We use life history data from West Germany to show that war widowhood increased women’s employment immediately after World War II but led to lower employment rates later in life. War widows, therefore, carried a double burden of employment and childcare while their children were young ...

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This paper analyses the impact of the modernization of the Swiss marital law in the 1980s on married women's labour force participation in Switzerland. The reform of the law comprised multiple measures to foster the equality between husband and wife within the marriage. The Swiss people voted on the reform in a referendum in 1985, accepting the new marital law. Hence at the time of the vote, it ...

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The seminar will share two connected papers, one newer, and in more need of feedback, than the other. The premise of both is the received wisdom that income rank matters for welfare, in particular life satisfaction. In most discussions, however, income comparisons are limited to the national population and evidence is correlational. In the first paper, we report on an experiment that randomized ...

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This study sheds light on the impact of different types of job retention programs such as short-time work (STW). We analyze the causal effect of an episode of STW on labor market outcomes up to five years later and compare this to the effects of sudden unemployment episodes. Using data from German Socio-Economic Panel (1992–2022), we employ an event-study approach to analyze the effect of ...

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The 15th International German Socio-Economic Panel User Conference (SOEP2024) this year was held at BBAW in Berlin from July 4 to July 5, 2024. The conference provided researchers who use the SOEP (including the SOEP part of the Cross-National Equivalent File (CNEF) and LIS/LWS data) with the opportunity to present and discuss their work with their peers. Researchers of all disciplines (e.g., ...

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Current developments in the labor income distribution shape the business cycle and the transmission of fiscal and monetary policy measures. During economic crises, timely and well targeted economic policy becomes essential but the volatility of the (labor) income distribution is particularly high. Detailed distributional data on household incomes becomes available after one year at the earliest. ...

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I present first descriptive evidence on gender differences and stereotypes in newspaper coverage of company board members in Germany through quantitative text analysis. Regularized regression shows that family-related terms are predictive of an article being about a woman. An association of women with family and men with careers is also shown in dictionary-based analyses using the term frequency ...

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Using panel data from Understanding Society, this paper presents a methodology for conceptualising and measuring poor-quality employment in the UK as a distinct concept from job quality. This allows us to identify the most vulnerable employed workers in the UK. Key to this approach is the recognition that poor employment conditions exacerbate each other leading to more intense levels of ...

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Fierce debate over the feasibility of cardinally measuring utility – or ‘wellbeing’ – with surveys has recently resurfaced. Several prominent papers claimed that when interpreting survey data as strictly ordinal, most of the literature’s results are easily reversed. We systematically assess this claim. To do so, we replicate the universe of wellbeing research published in top economics journals ...

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The pursuit of science (especially exact sciences) is commonly associated with the male gender. This might have a lot of negative consequences, including discrimination and underrepresentation of female researchers at academia. We conduct two experiments with a series of conditions that make it gradually easier to avoid misattribution of gender of a female scholar. In a novel Found-in-Translation ...

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The success of climate policies depends crucially on the dynamics of public support. Using unique longitudinal data from three surveys conducted between 2019 and 2022, we study the variations of public support for carbon pricing in Germany. The period includes two relevant events: the introduction and ramping up of carbon pricing in Germany and the exogenous increase in energy prices following the ...

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Work-limiting disabilities pose a significant risk to the earnings potential and welfare of older workers. While coverage of public disability insurance (DI) systems is almost universal, the risk of becoming dependent on DI varies across occupations. In this paper, I study the value of public DI across different occupations using data from administrative social security records in Germany. I ...

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Research on parental school choice provides strong evidence of so-called ‘white flight’ – that ethnic majority parents avoid choosing a local school if it contains large numbers of ethnic minority students. In this study, we examine such segregating choices in a formally stratified school system. Theoretically, we argue that segregating choices are less common in an educational setting where ...

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Newspaper coverage of firms’ CEOs is highly gendered. This presents a bias in itself but it might also have consequences for investments into the firm. In a survey experiment (N=tbd), we identify the causal impact of differential newspaper coverage for female and male CEOs on four outcomes: expected firm performance, investment into the firm, expected CEO ‘survival’, and expected performance in ...

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We investigate if and how adverse life events – early widowhood, divorce, disability, job loss - trigger informal insurance responses in the form of intervivos gifts. Drawing from Dutch register data, we construct comprehensive panels comprising individuals undergoing such shocks in the period 2011-2017, and we analyse the patterns of gift receipt surrounding these events. We run separate event ...

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Menopause marks a crucial juncture in women's lives and careers, coinciding with the peak of their income and working hours trajectory. On average, a third of women encounter severe health problems during this phase, exposing them to the risk of adverse labor market and health outcomes. Leveraging Norwegian registry data, coupled with panel data on doctor visits related to menopausal issues and ...

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Inexpensive and time-efficient web surveys have increasingly replaced survey interviews, especially conducted in person. Even well-known social surveys, such as the European Social Survey, follow this trend. However, web surveys suffer from low response rates and frequently struggle to assure that the data are of high quality. New advances in communication technology and artificial intelligence ...

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Joint Spring Meeting of BBSR, BTU & SOEP RegioHub Linking survey data with spatial data is an emerging topic in the social sciences, providing the possibility to contextualize sociodemographic information and social attitudes with geospatial data such as regional indicators, neighborhood information, or environmental time series. The provision of health care, education, housing markets, or ...

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