Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Teenage pregnancies and births in Germany: patterns and developments

We study the development of teenage fertility in East and West Germany using data from the German Socioeconomic Panel and from the German Mikrozensus. Following the international literature we derive hypotheses on the patterns of teenage fertility and test whether they are relevant to the German case. We find that teenage fertility is associated with teenage age and education, with the income of the ...

Do working hours affect health? Evidence from statutory workweek regulations in Germany

This study estimates the causal effect of working hours on health. We deal with the endogeneity of working hours through instrumental variables techniques. In particular, we exploit exogenous variation in working hours from statutory workweek regulations in the German public sector as an instrumental variable. Using panel data, we run two-stage least squares regressions controlling for individual-specific ...

Discursive Determinants of Attitudes towards Immigrants: Political Parties and Mass Media as Contextual Sources of Threat Perceptions

Immigration has been a vividly discussed topic in Europe in recent years, leading to an increased polarisation in many Western societies. This relates to rising immigration rates as well as to significant, dramatic events such as terrorist attacks and acts of xenophobic violence. A plethora of studies has investigated the impact of a country’s actual immigration on individual attitudes towards migrants. ...

Mass Media and Concerns about Immigration in Germany in the 21st Century: Individual-Level Evidence over 15 Years

Mass media has long been discussed as an essential determinant of the threat perceptions leading to anti-immigration attitudes. The field of empirical research on such media effects is still comparatively young, however, and lacks studies examining precise measures of the media environment an individual is likely to be actually exposed to. We employ a nuanced research design which analyses individual ...

Refugees Unwelcome? Changes in the Public Acceptance of Immigrants and Refugees in Germany in the Course of Europe’s ‘Immigration Crisis’

Based on an innovative design, combining a multi-factorial survey experiment with a longitudinal perspective, we examine changes in the public acceptance of immigrants in Germany from the beginning of the so-called ‘migration crisis’ to after the sexual assaults of New Year’s Eve (NYE) 2015/2016. In contrast to previous studies investigating similar research questions, our approach allows to differentiate ...

How does education improve cognitive skills? Instructional time versus timing of instruction

This paper investigates two mechanisms through which education may affect cognitive skills in adolescence, exploiting a school reform carried out at the state level in Germany as a quasi-natural experiment to identify causal effects: between 2001 and 2007, years at academic-track high school were reduced by one, leaving the overall curriculum unchanged. First, I exploit the variation over time and ...

Human Capital Returns to Education: Three Essays on the Causal Effects of Schooling on Skills and Health (Dissertation)

This dissertation estimates returns to education in terms of skills and health as important aspects of human capital given their importance in determining economic outcomes. The dissertation is based on three independent empirical research articles which constitute the three main chapters 2, 3, and 4, and a comprehensive introduction in Chapter 1 and conclusion in Chapter 5. The analyses exploit several ...

The Impact of Education on Personality - Evidence from a German High School Reform

This paper investigates the short-term effects of a reduction in the length of high school on students' personality traits using a school reform carried out at the state level in Germany as a quasi-natural experiment. Starting in 2001, academic-track high school (Gymnasium) was reduced from nine to eight years in most of Germany's federal states, leaving the overall curriculum unchanged. ...

No evidence for a protective effect of education on mental health

This paper analyzes whether education has a protective effect on mental health. To estimate causal effects, we employ an instrumental variable (IV) technique that exploits a reform extending compulsory schooling by one year implemented between 1949 and 1969 in West Germany. We complement analyses on the Mental Component Summary (MCS) score as a generic measure of overall mental health with an MCS-based ...

Welfare States, Gender and Poverty