Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Performance Pay and Happiness: Work vs. Home?

Using German survey data, we show conflicting influences of performance pay on overall life satisfaction. The overall influence reflects a strong positive influence through domains of life satisfaction associated with the job (job satisfaction, individual earnings satisfaction and household earning satisfaction) and a strong negative influence through domains away from the job (health satisfaction, ...

Variable pay and work hours: does performance pay reduce the gender time gap?

Using German survey data, we show in worker fixed effects estimates that performance pay is associated with a substantially lower gender hours gap. While performance pay increases the work hours of both men and women, the increase is much larger for women than for men. We argue that our finding likely reflects differences in household production and specialization by gender. Thus, we show that performance ...

Detach to Thrive: Psychological Detachment from Work and Employee Well-Being

Psychological detachment from work implies mentally disconnecting from work during off-job time. Using representative longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we identify psychological detachment from work as a key driver of employee well-being. This finding holds for a broad set of well-being indicators, including emotional responses, job satisfaction, life domain satisfactions, and ...

Health and Utilisation of Healthcare services in Germany

Mental health of Ukrainian refugees in Germany: results of the IAB-BAMF-SOEP survey

AIMS: Although Ukrainian refugees currently represent the largest group of asylum seekers living in Germany, little is known about their mental health. This contribution aims to identify the prevalence of depressive symptoms and anxiety disorders among Ukrainian refugees as well as to examine the determinants of mental health outcomes. METHODS: The analyses are based on representative data from the ...

Unintended social effects of newborn genomic data use and storage in the age of sociogenomics and genetic surveillance

Genetic data are increasingly important in the field of medicine for diagnostics as well as preventative health care. With the emergence of rapid and cost-effective DNA-sequencing technology, proposals and pilot studies of genomic newborn screening programs have been put in motion in several countries, with the hope of broad medical benefits for future generations. These plans are raising significant ...

Personalizing probabilistic survey scales

Central bank surveys frequently elicit households’ probabilistic beliefs about future inflation by employing response scales centered around zero inflation. Analyzing data from the high-inflation period of 2022/2023, we demonstrate how this practice leads to distortions in households’ responses, causing inconsistencies and resulting in biased estimates of both mean inflation expectations and uncertainty. ...

Levels and drivers of lifetime earnings

Trends in relative and absolute mobility of homeownership in Europe

Homeownership has declined markedly among younger generations across Europe. A common assumption is that this decline is increasingly stratified by parental homeownership, due to rising house prices and the growing importance of parental financial support. We show that this assumption does not hold for the average European. Using data from EU-SILC 2011 and 2019 covering 24 European countries, we examine ...

The integration of migrants in the German labour market: evidence over 50 years

Germany has become the second-most important destination for migrants worldwide. Using all waves from the microcensus, we study their labour market integration over the last 50 years and highlight differences to the US case. Although the employment gaps between immigrant and native men decline after arrival, they remain large for most cohorts; the average gap after one decade is 10 percentage points. ...