Topic Survey Methodology and Data-Science

Adding Household Surveys to the Behavioral Economics Toolbox: Insights from the SOEP Innovation Sample

While laboratory and field experiments are the major items in the toolbox of behavioral economists, household panel studies can complement them and expand their research potential. We introduce the German Socio-Economic Panel’s Innovation Sample (SOEP-IS), which offers researchers detailed panel data and the possibility to collect personalized experimental and survey data for free. We discuss what ...

Establishing a Probability Sample in a Crisis Context: The Example of Ukrainian Refugees in Germany in 2022

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, more than one million refugees have arrived in Germany. These Ukrainian refugees differ in many aspects from Germany’s past forced migration experiences and there exists an urgent need for sound data and information for politics, practitioners, and academics. In response, the IAB-BiB/FReDA-BAMF-SOEP study was established to provide high-quality ...

Schooling and Self-Control

While there is an established positive relationship between self-control and education, the direction of causality remains a matter of debate. We make a contribution to resolving this issue by exploiting a series of Australian and German educational reforms that increased minimum education requirements as a source of exogenous variation in education levels. Instrumental variables estimates suggest ...

Heteroskedastic Proxy Vector Autoregressions: An Identification-Robust Test for Time-Varying Impulse Responses in the Presence of Multiple Proxies

We propose a test for time-varying impulse responses in heteroskedastic structural vector autoregressions that can be used when the shocks are identified by external proxy variables as a group but not necessarily individually. The test is robust to the identification scheme for identifying the shocks individually and can be used even if the shocks are not identified individually. The asymptotic analysis ...

Rent Control Effects through the Lens of Empirical Research: An Almost Complete Review of the Literature

Rent control is a highly debated social policy that has been omnipresent since World War I. Since the 2010s, it is experiencing a true renaissance, for many cities and countries facing chronic housing shortages are desperately looking for solutions, directing their attention to controling housing rents and other restrictive policies. Is rent control useful or does it create more damage than utility? ...

Codevelopment of Life Goals and the Big Five Personality Traits across Adulthood and Old Age

Since the new millennium, research in the field of personality development has focused on the stability and change of basic personality traits. Motivational aspects of personality and their longitudinal association with basic traits have received comparably little attention. In this preregistered study, we applied bivariate latent growth curve model to investigated the codevelopment of nine life goals ...

SOEP-LEE2: Linking Surveys on Employees to Employers in Germany

This article presents the new linked employee-employer study of the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP-LEE2), which offers new research opportunities for various academic fields. In particular, the study contains two waves of an employer survey for persons in dependent work that is also linkable to the SOEP, a large representative German annual household panel (SOEP-LEE2-Core). Moreover, SOEP-LEE2 includes ...

Energy Transition Metals: Bottleneck for Net-Zero Emissions?

The energy transition requires substantial amounts of metals, including copper, nickel, cobalt, and lithium. Are these metals a bottleneck? We identify metal-specific demand shocks, estimate supply elasticities, and study the price impact of the transition in a structural scenario analysis. Prices of these four metals would reach previous historical peaks but for an unprecedented, sustained period ...

Study on the Effectiveness of COVID-Aid on Firms

The study investigates the impact of COVID-related State aid measures (COVID-aid) on firms’ performance in selected EU countries, distinguishing among different categories of (pre-crisis) firm size, economic sector, and type of financial instrument received. The current analysis covers three countries with available National State Aid Registries, namely Italy, Poland, and Spain, which enable precise ...

SOEP Annual Report 2023