Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

The Effect of Compulsory Schooling on Vaccination Against COVID

We study the effect of education on vaccination against COVID in Germany in a sample of individuals above the age of 60. In ordinary least squares regressions, we find that, in this age group, one more year of education goes along with a 0.7 percentage point increase in the likelihood to get a COVID vaccination. In two stage least squares regressions where changes in compulsory schooling laws are used ...

The GC Wealth Project Data Warehouse v.1 – Documentation

The GC Wealth Project, a central project of the Graduate Center’s Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, is a multi-year effort aimed at expanding and consolidating access to the most up-to-date research and information on wealth, wealth inequalities, and wealth transfers and related tax policies, across countries and over time. The GC Wealth Project website — first launched in June 2023 — is organized ...

Assessing the Measurement Quality of Justice Evaluations of Earnings in Europe

How individuals perceive the fairness of their pay carries profound implications for individuals and society. Perceptions of pay injustice are linked to a spectrum of negative outcomes, including diminished well-being, poor health, increased stress, and depressive symptoms, alongside various detrimental effects in the work domain. Despite the far-reaching impact of these justice evaluations, validity ...

The Role of Polygenic Indices in Inequality of Opportunity

Equality of opportunity is a principle of social justice, although there are different conceptions of it. We distinguish between fair and luck egalitarian equality of opportunity. Both conceptions consider to be unfair inequalities in life chances resulting from ascribed characteristics such as social origin and sex. They differ, however, in that fair equality of opportunity considers it fair when ...

Homeownership rates, housing policies, and co-residence decisions

Homeownership rates differ widely across European countries. We document that part of this variation is driven by differences in the fraction of adults co-residing with their parents. Comparing Germany and Italy, we show that in contrast to homeownership rates per household, homeownership rates per individual are very similar during the first part of the life cycle. To understand these patterns, we ...

Physical activity, health, and life satisfaction: Four panel studies demonstrate reciprocal effects

We examined the between-person correlations and within-person reciprocal effects of physical activity, long-standing health issues, self-rated health, and life satisfaction across four panels using random intercept cross-lagged panel models. Data were analyzed from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey (HILDA, N = 32,913, 21 waves, 1-year intervals), the German Socio-Economic ...

SOEP Annual Report 2021

The Effect of University Openings on Local Human Capital Formation: Difference-in-Differences Evidence from Germany

Between 1960 and 1979, 93 new universities opened in Germany. Using this large tertiary education expansion, I estimate the effect of a university opening on the probability of obtaining a university degree in the local population. I exploit the geographical variation in local university access in a difference-in-differences approach by comparing age cohorts in counties that were and were not affected ...

Does Family Structure Account for Child Achievement Gaps by Parental Education? Findings for England, France, Germany and the United States

Abstract This paper explores the role of family trajectories during childhood in explaining inequalities by maternal education in children's math and reading skills using harmonized, longitudinal, and nationally representative surveys, which follow children over the course of primary and lower secondary school in four high-income countries (England, France, Germany, and the United States). As ...

A feasible basic income scheme for Germany

Germany's social security system and its income taxation suffers from intransparent and inefficient interdependencies between the two systems. Additionally, work incentives of the current unemployment benefits are reduced by high implicit marginal tax rates. Due to these inconsistencies there is an ongoing debate in politics and economics to replace the current regulations with an unconditional ...