Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Happiness: Before and After the Kids

Understanding how having children influences parents’ subjective well-being (“happiness”) has great potential to explain fertility behavior. We study parental happiness trajectories before and after the birth of a child, using large British and German longitudinal data sets. We account for unobserved parental characteristics using fixed-effects models and study how sociodemographic factors modify the ...

Income Inequalities within Couples in the Czech Republic and European Countries

This study analyses the income distribution within couples in the Czech Republic and ten European countries using the EU-SILC 2005 database. Data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) database supplement the analysis with previous period (1986–2000). Women, on average, contribute less to a couple‘s income than men. Among the included countries, within-couple income inequality tends to be lower in ...

Automatic Stabilizers and Economic Crisis: United States vs. Europe

Do Smaller Households Increase Income Inequality?

Measuring Trust: Experiments and Surveys in Contrast and Combination

Trust is a concept that has attracted significant attention in economic theory and research within the last two decades: it has been applied in a number of contexts and has been investigated both as an explanatory and as a dependent variable. In this paper, we explore the questions of what exactly is measured by the diverse survey-derived scales and experiments claiming to measure trust, and how these ...

The Relationship between Inequality and GDP Growth: an Empirical Approach

The aim of this work is to analyze the relationship between inequality and economic growth. The results obtained by previous empirical papers were mixed. Authors such as Persson and Tabellini (1991) or Alesina and Rodrik (1994), in fact, find evidence of a negative relationship between the two variables of interest; on the contrary, Li and Zou (1998) and Forbes (2000) find that greater inequality is ...

The bonus share of flexible pay in Germany, Japan and the US: Some empirical regularities

Effect of Changes in Living Conditions on Well-Being: A Prospective Top–Down Bottom–Up Model

Using the German Socio-Economic Panel, we examined life-satisfaction and housing satisfaction before and after moving (N = 3,658 participants from 2,162 households) with univariate and bivariate two-intercept two-slope latent growth models. The main findings were (a) a strong and persistent increase in average levels of housing satisfaction, (b) no increase in average life-satisfaction, (c) low stability ...

Analyzing 21st Century Video Data on Situational Dynamics: Issues and Challenges in Video Data Analysis

Since the turn of the millennium researchers have access to an ever-increasing pool of novel types of video recordings. People use camcorders, mobile phone cameras, and even drones to film and photograph social life, and many public spaces are under video surveillance. More and more sociologists, psychologists, education researchers, and criminologists rely on such visuals to observe and analyze social ...

Video Data Analysis: A Methodological Frame for a Novel Research Trend

Since the early 2000s, the proliferation of cameras, whether in mobile phones or CCTV, led to a sharp increase in visual recordings of human behavior. This vast pool of data enables new approaches to analyzing situational dynamics. Application is both qualitative and quantitative and ranges widely in fields such as sociology, psychology, criminology, and education. Despite the potential and numerous ...