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Involuntary Job Loss and Changes in Personality Traits

Economists consider personality traits to be stable, particularly throughout adulthood. However, evidence from psychological studies suggests that the stability assumption may not always be valid, as personality traits can respond to certain life events. Our paper analyzes whether and to what extent personality traits are malleable over a time span of eight years for a sample of working individuals. ...

Company Rating with Support Vector Machines

This paper proposes a rating methodology that is based on a non-linear classification method, a support vector machine, and a non-parametric isotonic regression for mapping rating scores into probabilities of default. We also propose a four data set model validation and training procedure that is more appropriate for credit rating data commonly characterised with cyclicality and panel features. Tests ...

The effect of parental education on the offspring's mental health

We are the first to estimate the causal effect of parental education on a wide range of the adult offspring's mental health outcomes. Theoretical considerations predict positive direct and indirect effects of parental education on the offspring's mental health. But the relation between parental education and mental health outcomes is plagued by endogeneity. To circumvent this problem, we exploit...

Income groups and types of employment in Germany since 1995

This report examines how income groups and forms of employment in Germany have changed in the past two decades. Since the mid-1990s, inequality in disposable household income in Germany has generally increased. This trend was in effect until 2005. While fewer people had disposable incomes in the median range, the proportion of the population at both tails of the income distribution increased. At the ...

Changes in Common Ownership of German Companies

Ownership of publicly listed German companies has undergone significant changes in recent years. The aim of this report is to document these trends since 2007 and analyze the extent to which firms that compete in the same product market are owned by the same investors, which is known as common ownership. We show that some large foreign institutional investors have overtaken domestic investors and now ...

The Concentration in the Investor Market Has Intensified: Eight Questions for Jo Seldeslachts

"The concentration in the investor market has intensified": Eight questions for Jo Seldeslachts

Mr Seldeslachts, could you please explain the term "common ownership"? Common ownership means that one investor has shares in several companies at the same time. If you want to be even more precise it would be the same owner or investor having shares in several companies that compete in the same market. [...]

Just released: our new SOEP brochure “Living in Germany”

Our new brochure “Living in Germany” offers a compact source of information about the kinds of research currently being done with SOEP data and key findings from these studies. In it, we present a selection of research results with significant implications for society and policy making from the more than 7,000 papers published to date using SOEP data. And we introduce some of the researchers ...

Friederike Lenel has successfully defended her dissertation

Friederike Lenel, who worked at the Development and Security department, has successfully defended her dissertation at the Humboldt University Berlin. The dissertation with the title "Informal Support and Insurance - The interplay between inter-household support arrangements and access to alternative risk management resources" was supervised by Prof. Georg Weizsäcker, Ph.D. (DIW Berlin, ...

Does Broadband Internet Affect Fertility?

The spread of high-speed Internet epitomizes the digital revolution, affecting several aspects of our life. Using high quality German panel data, we test whether the availability of broadband Internet influences fertility choices in a low fertility setting, which is well-known for the difficulty to combine work and family life. Broadband can influence fertility through various pathways, including...