Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

The expansion of early childcare and transitions to first and second birth in Germany

We use quasi-experimental expansion of publicly funded childcare slots for children under the age of three from Germany and exploit regional variations of this large-scale expansion to account for endogenous and selective fertility decisions. To account for left and right censoring, we implement this quasi-experimental framework into the setting of the semiparametric Cox hazard model. By using spatial ...

Prenatal Exposure to Air Pollution and the Development of Noncognitive Skills

This paper provides causal evidence on the effect of in-utero exposure to air pollution on noncognitive ability in childhood. I use the meteorological phenomenon of thermal inversions to address the endogeneity in exposure to particulate matter and data from a representative household survey in Germany to measure noncognitive abilities. I find that an increase in particulate matter concentration by ...

Alternative Recipes for Life Satisfaction: Evidence from Five World Regions

In most cross-national research on Life Satisfaction (LS) an implicit assumption appears to be that the correlates of LS are the same the world over; ‘one size fits all’. Using data from the World Values Survey (1999–2014), we question this assumption by assessing the effects of differing personal values/life priorities on LS in five world regions: the West, Latin America, the Asian-Confucian region, ...

Extracting Agency and Communion From the Big Five: A Four-Way Competition

Agency and communion are the two fundamental content dimensions in psychology. The two dimensions figure prominently in many psychological realms (personality, social, self, motivational, cross-cultural, etc.). In contemporary research, however, personality is most commonly measured within the Big Five framework. We developed novel agency and communion scales based on the items from the most popular ...

Trust we lost: The impact of the Treuhand experience on political alienation in East Germany

Do politically administered mass layoffs undermine trust and political interest? During the German reunification, formerly state-owned socialist firms in East Germany were privatized by the Treuhand, which came at the cost of massive job losses and public protest. I demonstrate that these activities had a detrimental effect on attitudes and political behavior of the affected individuals. Using survey ...

Young Adults’ Housing Tenure Choices after Leaving the Parental Home: An Empirical Analysis Based on the German SOEP

In this master’s thesis, I examined the housing tenure choices of young adults after leaving the parental home. By distinguishing between four tenure types in owning, renting, subletting, and living in dormitories, I could add to the existing literature on housing and provide new insights into the housing careers of home leavers. I used data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and assessed the housing ...

Social Desirability and Central Tendency Bias in the Survey and Variation of Life Satisfaction

Even though life satisfaction is an empirically extensively researched well-being concept, there are still open questions regarding the variation of life satisfaction and the influence of variables that are not collected in data sets such as the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). In this article, I explore the question to what extent the variation of life satisfaction is influenced by biases resulting ...

Biological perspective of socioeconomic inequality

An inductive typology of egocentric networks with data from the Socio-Economic Panel

In this article we apply Random Forests to data from the German Socio-Economic-Panel (SOEP), creating an inductive typology of egocentric networks. Using an earlier application of the machine learning algorithm as a guideline, we are putting the wider applicability of the method to the test by using data not exclusively constructed for network analysis and focusing on core networks of respondents. ...

Gender, loneliness and happiness during COVID-19

We analyse a measure of loneliness from a representative sample of German individuals interviewed in both 2017 and at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Both men and women felt lonelier during the COVID-19 pandemic than they did in 2017. The pandemic more than doubled the gender loneliness gap: women were lonelier than men in 2017, and the 2017-2020 rise in loneliness was far larger for ...