Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Personality Traits Across the Life Cycle: Disentangling Age, Period, and Cohort Effects

Economists increasingly recognise the importance of personality traits for socio-economic outcomes, but little is known about the stability of these traits over the life cycle. Existing empirical contributions typically focus on age patterns and disregard cohort and period influences. This paper contributes novel evidence for the separability of age, period, and cohort effects for a broad range of ...

Working Life and Human Capital Investment: Causal Evidence from a Pension Reform

This paper presents a life-cycle model with human capital investment during working life through training and provides a novel empirical test of human capital theory. We exploit a sizable pension reform across adjacent cohorts in a regression discontinuity setting and find that an increase in working life increases training. We discuss and test further predictions regarding the relation between initial ...

House Price Expectations

This study examines short-, medium-, and long-run price expectations in housing markets. We derive and test six hypothesis about the incidence, formation, and relevance of price expectations. To do so, we use data from a tailored household survey, past sale and rental offerings, satellites, and from an information RCT. As novel findings, we show that price expectations exhibit mean reversion in the ...

Worker Stress and Performance Pay: German Survey Evidence

While performance pay can benefit firms and workers by increasing productivity and wages, it has also been associated with a deterioration of worker health. The transmission mechanisms for this deterioration remain in doubt. We examine the hypothesis that increased stress is one transmission mechanism. Using unique survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we find performance pay consistently ...

Health-related quality of life of individuals sharing a household with persons with dementia

Introduction: Previous research has found a negative effect of dementia on the health-related quality of life (HrQoL) of persons with dementia (PWD) and their primary informal caregivers. However, the impact of dementia on HrQoL of other individuals sharing a household with PWD has not been investigated to date. The current study therefore aimed to determine differences in the HrQoL between those sharing ...

Importance of Personality Traits for Destination-Language Acquisition: Evidence for Refugees in Germany

We analyze the role of personality traits in destination-language proficiency among recent refugees in Germany. While personality traits have been shown to predict educational outcomes, they have been largely overlooked for immigrants’ language acquisition. We extend a well-established model of destination-language proficiency and assume that personality traits’ effects manifest through the channels ...

The role of different school organizational models in the psychological adaptation of refugee adolescents

Given the high number of refugee children and adolescents around the globe, it is critical to determine conditions that foster their adaptation in the receiving country. This study investigated the psychological adaptation of recently arrived adolescent refugees in Germany. We focused on whether psychological adaptation reflects the organizational approach taken by the school that refugee adolescents ...

An Econometric Analysis of Environmental Phenomena

Diese Dissertation befasst sich mit den Auswirkungen von Luftverschmutzung und Naturkatastrophen auf verschiedene Aspekte der menschlichen Umwelt. Im ersten Abschnitt konzentriere ich mich auf die Luftverschmutzung. Konkret stelle ich in Kapitel 2 fest: Die stündlichen Veränderungen der Luftverschmutzung wirken sich über zwei verschiedene Wege auf die Kriminalität aus, und zwar über physiologische ...

Social Contacts of Refugees

Social Networks and Health Inequalities in Young and Middle Adulthood

In this chapter we deal with the health and inequality aspects of networks from a psychological and sociological life span perspective. In doing so, we pay attention to the mutual interactions between health, social inequality, and networks in the context of biographical transitions that decisively shape the life course of adults. We focus exclusively on young and middle adulthood—here roughly defined ...