Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Does the IAB employment sample reliably identify maternity leave taking? A data report

On the Equivalence of Common Approaches to Cross Sectional Weights in Household Panel Surveys

The computation of cross sectional weights in household panels is challenging because household compositions change over time. Sampling probabilities of new household entrants are generally not known and assigning them zero weight is not satisfying. Two common approaches to cross sectional weighting address this issue: (1) “shared weights” and (2) modeling or estimating unobserved sampling probabilities ...

The implementation of cross-sectional weights in household panel surveys

While household panel surveys are longitudinal in nature cross-sectional sampling weights are also of interest. The computation of cross-sectional weights is challenging because household compositions change over time. Sampling probabilities of household entrants after wave 1 are generally not known and assigning them zero weight is not satisfying. Two common approaches to cross-sectional weighting ...

Collecting Genetic Samples in Population Wide (Panel) Surveys: Feasibility, Nonresponse and Selectivity

Collecting biomarkers as part of general purpose surveys offers scientists - and social scientists in particular - the ability to study biosocial phenomena, e.g. the relation between genes and human behavior. We explore the feasibility of collecting buccal cells for genetic analyses with normal interviewers as part of a pretest for the German Socio-economic Panel Study (SOEP) using a probability sample. ...

Household survey panels: how much do following rules affect sample size?

In household panels, typically all household members are surveyed. Because household composition changes over time, so-called following rules are implemented to decide whether to continue surveying household members who leave the household (e.g. former spouses/partners, grown children) in subsequent waves. Following rules have been largely ignored in the literature leaving panel designers unaware of ...

Youth’s Causal Beliefs About Success: Socioeconomic Differences and Prediction of Early Career Development

Youth’s career attainment is associated with socioeconomic background, but may also be related to their beliefs about causes of success. Relationships between 17-year-olds’ socioeconomic status (SES) and causal beliefs about success, and whether these beliefs predict career attainment after completing a vocational or university degree were examined using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study ...

Private Spending on Children’s Education: Low-Income Families Pay Relatively More

Education is not financed solely by the taxpayer— many institutions and activities require payment of top-up fees, at the very least, this applies for instance to education and care services for children. A household’s private expenditure on education depends largely on the families’ available financial resources. However, to date, very little research has been conducted on the relationship between ...

Reasonable sample sizes for convergence to normality

The central limit theorem says that, provided an estimator fulfills certain weak conditions, then, for reasonable sample sizes, the sampling distribution of the estimator converges to normality. We propose a procedure to find out what a “reasonably large sample size” is. The procedure is based on the properties of Gini’s mean difference decomposition. We show the results of implementations of the procedure ...

Revisiting the evidence for cardinal treatment of ordinal variables

Well-being (life satisfaction or happiness) is a latent variable that is impossible to observe directly. Moreover, it does not have a unit of measurement. Hence, survey questionnaires usually ask people to rate their well-being in different domains. The common practice of comparing well-being by means of averages or linear regressions ignores the fact that well-being is an ordinal variable. Since data ...

How Income Inequality Influences Life Satisfaction: Hybrid Effects Evidence from the German SOEP

This study uses hybrid effects regressions with the German Socio-Economic Panel to compare differences in happiness between Germans during times of high and low income inequality. It shows that Germans interviewed during times of persistently low inequality were no more satisfied with their lives than Germans during times of persistently high inequality. However, the article also uses within effects ...