SOEP Research: Survey Methodology and Data Science

Identifying Optimizers, Extremists, and Indifferents: Latent Satisficing Patterns in Panel Surveys

Data quality is known to be compromised when respondents cognitively shortcut the survey response process. This satisficing behavior leads to inaccurate and unreliable responses that are hard to compensate after data collection. Thus, detecting and understanding survey satisficing is crucial for developing and implementing effective preventive measures in longitudinal data collection contexts. We use ...

Do talk money – Reducing income nonresponse in surveys (with Katharina Allinger)

Item nonresponse is a common issue in surveys. We implement an experiment to reduce nonresponse to income questions in an international household survey, looking at four different countries. Survey respondents are asked to report their exact household income. We randomize those who refuse to answer into two groups. In a follow-up question, the control group is asked to choose their income from a...

Introduction to Lab²: A MetaLab for Better Science

The replicability crisis highlights the need for more transparent and robust research practices. Lab² (Lab-Square) is a collaborative initiative using meta-scientific approaches to improve research credibility. Through large-scale projects like Many-Labs, Many-Designs, and Many-Analysts, we assess the generalizability of findings across populations, methods, and analytical approaches. Lab² also...

Regional Decline, Satisfaction with Democracy and Support for Right-Wing Populist Parties. Evidence from Germany (with Larissa Deppisch)

A consistent finding in research on the success of right-wing populist parties is that they gain support in regions that are peripheralized. In such regions, the decline of manufacturing jobs, public services, and infrastructure is thought to lead to growing frustration with democratic institutions and mainstream political parties, providing opportunities for right-wing populist parties to...

Learn to use the SOEP over lunch

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...

Who Benefits from Place-based Policies? Evidence from Matched Employer-Employee Data (with Philipp Grunau, Florian Hoffmann, and Thomas Lemieux)

We study the wage and employment effects of a German place-based policy using a research design that exploits conditionally exogenous EU-wide rules governing the program parameters at the regional level. The place-based program subsidizes investments to create jobs with a subsidy rate that varies across labor market regions. The analysis uses matched data on the universe of establishments and...

The #ManyDaughters Study is Officially Kicking Off!

We are happy to announce the launch of the #ManyDaughters Study, an international research initiative exploring how having daughters influences behavior, preferences, and attitudes. Researchers from all fields of social sciences are invited to participate in this collaborative project, which will use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) to test four key hypotheses on the impact of daughters ...

The Beyondpareto Command for Optimal Extreme-Value Index Estimation

In this article, we introduce the command beyondpareto, which estimates the extreme-value index for distributions that are Pareto-like, that is, whose upper tails are regularly varying and eventually become Pareto. The estimation is based on rank-size regressions, and the threshold value for the upper-order statistics included in the final regression is determined optimally by minimizing the asymptotic ...

SOEP Annual Report 2024

Immigration, Segregation, and Attitudes Toward Immigrants: A Longitudinal Multiscalar Analysis across Egohoods

Evidence on how proximity to ethnic outgroups shapes attitudes toward immigration remains inconclusive. We suggest this may be driven, in part, by the fact that studies rarely account for the role of residential segregation. We argue that how the minority-share in an environment affects majority-group attitudes will depend on how segregated groups are from one another. To explore this, we undertake ...