Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Intergenerational Relationships

Intergenerational relationships within family and kinship structures have become a salient issue in scientific research. The major reasons for this are the intense demographic changes that occurred throughout the twentieth century, such as an increased life expectancy in combination with decreased fertility, and the implications of this for the major institutions of the social welfare state. This has ...

Technological Innovation and Inclusive Growth in Germany

Technological innovation has historically contributed to inclusive economic growth in Germany. In more recent decades, however, this contribution has weakened due to the declining impact of technological innovation on labor productivity growth. Fearing that this declining impact would undermine the international competitiveness of the economy, real labor compensation was progressively curbed since ...

The Effect of Leisure Activities on Life Satisfaction: The Importance of Holiday Trips

Does active leisure make life more satisfying? If so, what kind of leisure activity is the greatest contributor to happiness? These questions are answered by means of data from four waves of a large-scale continuous study of the general public in Germany. Cross-sectional analysis does not show much of a relationship between happiness and last year’s leisure activities, with the exception of holiday ...

Intergenerational Transmission of Risk Attitudes − A Revealed Preference Approach

This study investigates whether children and parents show a similar willingness to take risk in their choice of occupation. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we calculate the occupational variation in earnings unexplained by human capital differences to obtain a measure of occupational risk. We find that fathers' earnings risk is significantly positively related to sons' earnings ...

Politics and parents - Intergenerational transmission of values after a regime shift

Exploiting the "natural experiment" of German reunification, we study whether socialism has an enduring effect on people's basic values. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we show that individuals that lived in the German Democratic Republic assign different importance to six out of nine values. The first subsequent generation differs in a similar way from their West German ...

Dynastic Inequality Compared: Multigenerational Mobility in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany

Using harmonized household survey data, we analyse long run social mobility in the US, the UK, and Germany and test recent theories of multigenerational persistence of socio-economic status. In this country comparison setting we find evidence against Gregory Clark’s “universal law of social mobility”. In general, our results show that the long run persistence of socio-economic status tends to vary ...

Socioeconomic situation and health outcomes of single parents

Mechanisms of Poverty Alleviation - A New Method for Disaggregating Anti-Poverty Effects into Various Transfer Programs in Different Types of Welfare States

Adequacy of Social Minimums: Workfare, Gender and Poverty Alleviation in Welfare Democracies

Social Assistance and Minimum Income Protection in the EU: Vulnerability, Adequacy, and Convergence

In this paper social assistance developments are analyzed in a large number of EU member states, including European transition countries and the new democracies of southern Europe. The empirical analysis is based on the unique and recently established SaMip Dataset, which provides social assistance benefit levels for 27 countries from 1990-2005. It is shown that social assistance benefits have had ...