Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Pension Reform in Germany: The Impact on Retirement Decisions

Do Natural Disasters Stimulate Individual Saving? Evidence from a Natural Experiment in a Highly Developed Country

While various empirical studies have found negative growth-effects of natural disasters, little is yet known about the microeconomic channels through which disasters might affect short- and especially long-term growth. This paper contributes to filling this gap in the literature by studying how natural disasters affect individual saving decisions. This study makes use of a natural experiment created ...

Language-Skill Complementary: Returns to Immigrant Language Acquisition

Multidimensionality of Well-Being and Spillover Effects Across Life Domains: How Do Parenthood and Personality Affect Changes in Domain-Specific Satisfaction?

Whether having children improves our well-being is a long-standing topic of debate. Demographic and sociological research has investigated changes in individuals’ overall well-being and partnership satisfaction when they become parents. However, little is known about how becoming parent may produce vulnerability—observable as an enduring decrease in well-being—in life domains that are strongly interdependent ...

The Chernobyl Disaster, Concern about the Environment, and Life Satisfaction

Maternal Employment, Life Satisfaction, and Child Developmental Outcomes (Dissertation)

Locus of Control and Mothers’ Return to Employment

This paper investigates the effect of locus of control (LOC) on the length of mothers’ employment break after childbirth. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), duration data reveals that women with an internal LOC return to employment more quickly than women with an external LOC.We find that this effect is particularly pronounced in jobs in which the penalties in terms of lower ...

Unburden Renters by Making Landlords Pay the Commission? Evaluating a Policy Reform in Germany

When renting an apartment, often a commission is payable by the renter. In a perfect market, standard economic reasoning predicts the rental price for an apartment with a commission payable by the renter to be lower than the price for the same apartment without commission. We test this hypothesis against an alternative hypothesis based on insights from behavioral economics about mental accounting, ...

Maternal life satisfaction and child outcomes: Are they related?

This paper investigates the association between maternal life satisfaction and the developmental functioning of two- to three-year-old children as well as the socio-emotional behavior of five- to six-year-old children. We use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), which allows us to control for a rich set of child and parental characteristics and to use the mother’s life satisfaction ...

The Struggle between Equity and Efficiency: Evidence from the Luxembourg Income Study