Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Testing Theories of Happiness

Latter-day researches based on reported subjective well-being have improved the understanding of utility. The concept of utility has acquired a psychological content, and has proved to be operational in researches on income, unemployment, inflation, inequality, and democratic institutions in their relations with happiness. The authors plead for fostering happiness researches, and give examples in which ...

Economic Consequences of Mispredicting Utility

In a simple conceptual framework, we organize a multitude of phenomena related to the (mis)prediction of utility. Consequences in terms of distorted choices and lower well-being emerge if people have to trade-off between alternatives that are characterized by attributes satisfying extrinsic desires and alternatives serving intrinsic needs. Thereby the neglect of asymmetries in adaptation is proposed ...

Household composition and Savings: An Empirical Analysis based on the German SOEP data

The Effect of Employment Protection Legislation on Dismissals in Germany

Labor Market Policy and the Convergence of Interests: The "Benefits" of the German Handicapped Act for Employers and Employees

Family related transfers and child poverty across Europe

Public Transfers, Income Distribution, and Poverty in Germany and in the United States

Immigration has Increased Income Inequality and Poverty in Germany Slightly

Biography and Life History Data in the German Socio Economic Panel (SOEP, v27, 1984 - 2010)

Regional Income Stratification in Unified Germany Using a Gini Decomposition Approach

This paper delivers new insights into the development of income inequality and regional stratification in Germany after unification using a new method for detecting social stratification by a decomposition of the GINI index which yields the obligatory between- and within-group components as well as an overlapping index for the different sup-populations. We find that East Germany is still a stratum ...