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Register now for the online workshop series SOEPcampus: Learn to use the SOEP over lunch

In March/April 2026 our online over lunch seminar series returns with one last workshop this year. The workshop provides a comprehensive, practical introduction to the data of the Socio-economic Panel (SOEP) on three Wednesdays during lunchtime. Participants will learn about the study's content, data structure, sample selection, and weighting strategy, along with an overview of the study documentation. To ...

SOEP User Conference 2026 - Call for Papers

The call for papers for the 16th International German Socio-Economic Panel User Conference is online. SOEP 2026 will take place from July 8-9, 2026, in Berlin, and researchers from all disciplines are invited to submit an abstract. We particularly welcome contributions addressing meta-science, robustness, replicability, reproducibility, and open science. This includes, but is not limited to, studies ...

Private companies promise commercial fusion energy in a few years, although large-scale research projects remain in the realm of fundamental research

Nuclear Fusion Research Shifts Focus: Commercial Niche Products instead of Energy Promises

Nuclear fusion research shifts focus: commercial niche products instead of energy generation. Nuclear fusion, in which atomic nuclei are fused, promises clean, safe, and virtually inexhaustible energy. Since the 1950s, this promise has justified extensive public investment in research, without any real progress being made toward commercial use in the energy sector. However, nuclear fusion research ...

Introduction to Bayesian Macroeconometrics

The starting point of this course is a self-contained introduction to Bayesian estimation and inference. We proceed with the Bayesian estimation of reduced-form vector autoregressions, discussing popular families of prior distributions and how to sample from the resulting posterior distributions. Next, we move from reduced-form to structural VARs. We show how Bayesian inference can be implemented...

Parent-child Mismatches in Educational Aspirations: Prevalence, Stability, and Convergence over time

Life-course scholarship has documented the important role of educational aspirations in status attainment processes but has also revealed that parent-child mismatches in educational aspirations may negatively affect child development. However, it is unclear how parent-child mismatches in educational aspirations evolve over time. Here, we examine (1) the prevalence of mismatching aspirations across ...

What Is the “Right” Geographic Market Definition?

This paper examines the “right” geographic definition of relevant markets by analyzing how excise tax pass-through varies with local competition in the retail gasoline market of a large metropolitan city. Using a natural experiment from three unanticipated and exogenous fuel tax hikes and detailed station-level price data, we show that average pass-through is invariant to the number of nearby competitors ...

SOEP-Core v40.1 – INSTRUMENTATION: Information on the Utilization of Questionnaires

Designing Hedging Instruments for Locational Price Risks – Lessons from North American Financial Transmission Rights

Locational marginal pricing (LMP) provides efficient locational dispatch and investment signals but requires a complementary congestion hedging instrument to function effectively. This paper investigates how exposure to locational price differences is managed in North American nodal electricity markets through the implementation of financial transmission rights (FTRs). Drawing on insights from 15 industry ...

Increasing Prices, Declining Productivity, higher Markups? – Analysis of Market Conditions in the Construction Industry

The project examines the development of markups in the construction sector against the backdrop of existing strucutral issues and the planned public investment initiative amounting to €500 billion. Inter alia, construction prices have increased significantly more strongly than overall consumer prices since 2010, while labor productivity has declined markedly over the same period. This opposing...