Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Political Socialization in Flux? Linking Family Non-Intactness during Childhood to Adult Civic Engagement

Some sociologists argue that non-intact family structures during childhood have a negative effect on adult children's civic engagement, since they undermine, and in some cases prevent, the processes and activities through which parents shape their children's political attitudes and orientations. In this paper, we evaluate this hypothesis on the basis of longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic ...

Social Mobility in the 20th Century: Class Mobility and Occupational Change in the United States and Germany

Based on a novel class scheme and a unique compilation of German and American data, this book reveals that intergenerational class mobility increased over most of the past century. While country differences in intergenerational mobility are surprisingly small, gender, regional, racial and ethnic differences were initially large but declined over time. At the end of the 20th century, however, mobility ...

Class mobility across three generations in the U.S. and Germany

Based on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the Socio-economic Panel, we study the class mobility of three concurrent generations in the U.S. and Germany. We find that, in both countries, the grandfathers’ class is directly associated with their grandchildren's social position. We propose three possible mechanisms which could explain the observed multigenerational mobility patterns. ...

The Aggregate Effects of the Hartz Reforms in Germany

This paper quantifies the impact of the Hartz reforms on matching efficiency, using monthly SOEP gross worker flows (1983-2009). We show that, until the early 2000s, close to 60% of changes in the unemployment rate are due to changes in the inflow rate (job separation). On the contrary, since the implementation of the reforms in the mid-2000s, the importance of the outflow rate (job finding) has been ...

The ins and outs of German unemployment: a transatlantic perspective

This article decomposes fluctuations in the German unemployment rate into changes in inflows (job separation) and outflows (job finding). For this purpose, we construct and examine monthly labour market transition rates from the West German sample of the SOEP (and the CPS) for the period 1984–2009. We explicitly take account of the low level of labour market transition rates in Germany. Our article ...

Retirement Expectations in Germany—Towards Rising Social Inequality?

In the last 20 years, German policy makers have reformed the pension system and the labor market with the aim of prolonging working life. As a consequence, older workers’ employment rate and average retirement age rose. In addition to the actual behavior of today’s retiree cohorts, the reforms also influence the expected retirement age of future pensioners, the development of which will be investigated ...

Members of German Federal Parliament More Risk-Loving Than General Population

The article analyzes the question of whether career politicians differ systematically from the general population in terms of their attitudes toward risk. A written survey of members of the 17th German Bundestag in late 2011 identified their risk attitudes, and the survey data was set in relation to respondents to the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) for the survey year 2009 (2002 through 2012). ...

Are political representatives more risk-loving than the electorate? Evidence from German federal and state parliaments

Political representatives frequently make decisions with far-reaching implications for citizens and societies. Most of these decisions are choices in situations in which the probabilities of gains and losses are hard to estimate. Although decision-making is crucial to politics, existing research has hardly ever addressed the political representation of traits that notably influence decision-making. ...

Exposure to television and individual beliefs: Evidence from a natural experiment

Does the information provided by mass media have the power to persistently affect individual beliefs about the drivers of success in life? To answer this question empirically, this contribution exploits a natural experiment on the reception of West German television in the former German Democratic Republic. After identifying the impact of Western television on individual beliefs and attitudes in the ...

Globalization, income distribution and voter preferences: Transmission mechanisms and reform acceptance (Dissertation)