Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Working time preferences, hours mismatch and well-being of couples: Are there spillovers?

Working time arrangements determine, to a large extent, the successful balancing of work and family life. This study investigates the role of working time preferences and hours mismatch for well-being among couples. The empirical evidence indicates that well-being is generally lower among those with working time mismatch. Particularly underemployment is detrimental for well-being. We further provide ...

The Research Data Centre of the German Federal Employment Agency: Data Supply and Demand between 2004 and 2009

Does (Event) History Matter? A Spell-Based Approach to Poverty Dynamics

More is Not Necessarily Better: An Empirical Analysis of the Inequality-Growth Tradeoff Using the Luxembourg Income Study

Work and the Life Course: A Cosmopolitan-Local Perspective

Job Insecurity: Differential Effects of Subjective and Objective Measures on Life Satisfaction Trajectories of Workers Aged 27–30 in Germany

Job insecurity has become increasingly evident in European countries in recent years. In Germany, legislation has increased insecurity through erosion of the standard employment relationship. Fixed-term contracts are central to definitions of insecurity based on atypical or precarious work but there is still limited understanding of what creates insecurity and how it affects workers. Drawing on Bourdieu’s ...

Income Inequality Developments in the Great Recession

Immigration and Attitudes Towards Day Care

We examine the relationship between preferences for the public funding of school children day care and the share of foreign pupils in German jurisdictions. To this end, we employ multilevel models to analyze individual-level data from the 1997 and 2002 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel and data on different jurisdiction-levels from official sources. In contrast to a number of recent studies ...

Do Couples Bargain over Fertility? Evidence Based on Child Preference Data

Empirical literature has found evidence in favor of household bargaining models. In contrast to earlier tests that are limited to assignable private goods, we use child preference data in order to extend the empirical evidence on household bargaining to public household goods. In the empirical analysis, we exploit the different theoretical predictions for couples with heterogeneous and homogeneous ...

Unconditional Child Benefits, Mothers’ Labor Supply, and Family Well-Being: Evidence from a Policy Reform

In many parts of the developed world, governments devote a significant share of public funds to unconditional family cash transfers in an attempt to promote the economic well-being of households. But how successful are such policies? Germany has one of the world’s most generous child benefit systems, which was subject to a major reform in the mid-1990s. This article exploits the reform using a difference-in-differences ...