Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

SOEP as a Source for Research on Ageing - Issues, Measures and Possibilities for Improvement

Skill demand and the comparative advantage of age: Jobs tasks and earnings from the 1980s to the 2000s in Germany

We study the impact of rapid technological change on age and cohort variation in type of work and wages among German men for the 1986–2006 period. Using a task-based approach, we analyze the consequences that technological progress had on changes in the distribution of tasks performed by the men and the relative wages they received. Technological changes implied fewer physically demanding job tasks ...

Deteriorating health satisfaction among immigrants from Eastern Europe in Germany

Work Out or Out of Work: The Labor Market Return to Physical Fitness and Leisure Sport Activities

This study is the first to present evidence of the return to leisure sports in the job hiring process by sending fictitious applications to real job openings in the Swedish labor market. In the field experiment job applicants were randomly given different information about their type and level of leisure sport being engaged in. Applications which signal sport skills have a significantly higher callback ...

Comparative Overview of Household Definitions Used in Major Household Panel Surveys

Effects of Personality on the Transition into Caregiving

Recent research has emphasized the critical role of personality in the caregiving situation, but not much is known about how individual differences shape the transitions into and out of caregiving. Based on longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP, N= 14,495), we explored how personality is associated with adopting and maintaining the caregiving role. The results revealed that individuals ...

Probing Birth-Order Effects on Narrow Traits Using Specification-Curve Analysis

The idea that birth-order position has a lasting impact on personality has been discussed for the past 100 years. Recent large-scale studies have indicated that birth-order effects on the Big Five personality traits are negligible. In the current study, we examined a variety of more narrow personality traits in a large representative sample ( n = 6,500-10,500 in between-family analyses; n = 900-1,200 ...

What Else Are You Worried About?" – Integrating Textual Responses into Quantitative Social Science Research

Open-ended questions have routinely been included in large-scale survey and panel studies, yet there is some perplexity about how to actually incorporate the answers to such questions into quantitative social science research. Tools developed recently in the domain of natural language processing offer a wide range of options for the automated analysis of such textual data, but their implementation ...

Worries across time and age in the German Socio-Economic Panel study

We investigate how indicators of dissatisfaction—worries about a variety of life domains such as health, the state of the economy, and immigration—change across time and age in Germany based on Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) data. As expected, contemporary world events influenced respondents’ worries. For example, worries about peace peaked in 2003, the year of the Iraq War; worries about both immigration ...

Examining the Effects of Birth Order on Personality

This study examined the long-standing question of whether a person’s position among siblings has a lasting impact on that person’s life course. Empirical research on the relation between birth order and intelligence has convincingly documented that performances on psychometric intelligence tests decline slightly from firstborns to later-borns. By contrast, the search for birth-order effects on personality ...