Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Beyond the Hedonic Treadmill - Revising the Adaptation Theory of Well-Being

According to the hedonic treadmill model, good and bad events temporarily affect happiness, but people quickly adapt back to hedonic neutrality. The theory, which has gained widespread acceptance in recent years, implies that individual and societal efforts to increase happiness are doomed to failure. The recent empirical work outlined here indicates that 5 important revisions to the treadmill model ...

A note on representativeness and household finance

Previous research has shown that social households have a higher probability of owning risky assets. Using a representative sample of the German population, we demonstrate that the sociability effect is much stronger among people younger than 50.

Internalized Gender Stereotypes Vary Across Socioeconomic Indicators

In the following we aim to approach the question of why, in most domains of professional and economic life, women are more vulnerable than men to becoming targets of prejudice and discrimination by proposing that one important cause of this inequality is the presence of gender stereotypes in many domains of society. We describe two approaches employed to measure gender stereotypes: An explicit questionnaire ...

Aussiedler in Germany: From Smooth Adaption to Tough Integration

Subjective Well-Being and Relative Deprivation: An Empirical Link

Introduction

Income Satisfaction and Relative Deprivation: An Empirical Link

Individual Wellbeing in a Dynamic Perspective

We explore the determinants of individual wellbeing as measured by self-reported levels of satisfaction with income and life. Making use of the German Socio-Economic Panel, we provide empirical evidence for wellbeing depending on absolute and relative income levels in a dynamic framework where status and signal effects play a role. This finding holds after controlling for other factors in a multivariate ...

Satisfaction with Life and Economic Well-Being: Evidence from Germany

The relationship between an individual's economic well-being and satisfaction with own life has been the focus of many studies both within and across countries, in one period of time and over time. As a proxy of economic well-being household income both adjusted and unadjusted for household needs has been generally used. The aim of the present paper is to propose a more comprehensive measure of ...

Joachim R. Frick (1962-2011): In Memoriam