Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Conversion of Non-Respondents in an Ongoing Panel Survey: The Case of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)

The results of a resurvey of non-respondents to the SOEP study carried out in 2006 show that this special effort of reinterviewing was relatively ineffective in two respects. First, the rate of successful conversions of passive to active respondents was low (less than 20 percent). Second, the composition of the longitudinal file did not improve. The same groups that showed high dropout rates in the ...

Identification, characteristics and Impact of Faked Interviews in Surveys

Characteristics and impact of faked interviews in surveys - An analysis of genuine fakes in the raw data of SOEP

Leisure and Housing Consumption after Retirement: New Evidence on the Life-Cycle Hypothesis

We revisit the alleged retirement consumption puzzle. According to the life-cycle theory, foreseeable income reductions such as those around retirement should not affect consumption. However, we first recall that given higher leisure endowments after retirement, the theory does predict a fall of total market consumption expenditures. In order not to mistake this predicted drop for a puzzle we focus ...

Auf der Suche nach Energiearmut: Eine Potentialanalyse des Low-Income-High-Cost Indikators für Deutschland

The term „fuel poverty“ describes to what extent increasing energy costs lead to a new kind of indebtness and poverty of low income households. Up to now there is no sufficient measuring method to identify fuel poverty households in Germany. The present paper reviews a British approach regarding its adaptability on German data. The aim is to examine the potential of the “Low-Income-High-Costs” indicator ...

Copayments for ambulatory care in Germany: a natural experiment using a difference-in-difference approach

In response to increasing health expenditures and a high number of physician visits, the German government introduced a copayment for ambulatory care in 2004 for individuals with statutory health insurance (SHI). Because persons with private insurance were exempt from the copayments, this health-care reform can be regarded as a natural experiment. We used a difference-in-difference approach to examine ...

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 ...