Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Social and Economic Characteristics of Financial and Blood Donors in Germany

Surveys of the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) have shown that Germans donated around 5.3 billion euros in 2009 — right in the middle of the financial and economic crisis. The type and amount of donations made is well documented in Germany. However, until recently, there was very little information available on the identity of Germans who share their income with people in need. A new survey ...

Impact of Life-Course Events on Car Ownership

Interactions Between Residential Relocations, Life Course Events, and Daily Commute Distances

This paper presents results from a project investigating interdependencies among residential changes, other life course events, and transport. The main goal is to identify specific relocations and other key events during a person's life with a significant impact on changes in travel behavior. With the theoretical background of the mobility biographies approach–assuming that travel behavior is ...

Robust Estimation of Wage Dispersion with Censored Data: An Application to Occupational Earnings Risk and Risk Attitudes

We present a semiparametric method to estimate group-level dispersion, which is particularly effective in the presence of censored data. We apply this procedure to obtain measures of occupation-specific wage dispersion using top-coded administrative wage data from the German IAB Employment Sample (IABS). We then relate these robust measures of earnings risk to the risk attitudes of individuals working ...

Crowding-out of Unskilled Workers in the Business Cycle: Evidence from West Germany

Marriage and Earnings: Why Do Married Men Earn More than Single Men?

This article investigates how marriage affects the wages of men in Germany. A variety of reasons have been proposed for why married men earn higher wages than single men; however, previous tests of the leading explanations have been inconclusive. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, it is found that married men enjoy a wage premium even after controlling for self-selection into marriage. ...

Parenthood and Life Satisfaction: Why Don't Children Make People Happy?

Previous research on the association between parenthood and life satisfaction has shown that parents of minor children are not more satisfied with their lives than childless people. This study addressed the question of why children do not enhance their parents' life satisfaction. A major objective of this study was to determine whether and to what extent the costs of raising children act as suppressors ...

The Work and Wishes of Fathers: Actual and Preferred Work Hours among German Fathers

We examine the connection between fatherhood and employment hours using 30 years of data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP 1985–2014). By inspecting how actual hours, preferred hours, and the correspondence between actual and preferred hours change during fatherhood, we clarify the interplay between fathers’ preferences and the labour market structures they encounter. We find that men born ...

The effects of exposure to images of others' suffering and vulnerability on altruistic, trust-based, and reciprocated economic decision-making

In this paper we explored the effects of exposure to images of the suffering and vulnerability of others on altruistic, trust-based, and reciprocated incentivized economic decisions, accounting for differences in participants’ dispositional empathy and reported in-group trust for their recipient(s). This was done using a pictorial priming task, framed as a memory test, and a triadic economic game design. ...

Statistical needs in Eastern Europe