Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Intra-Household Decision-Making: New Evidence from the Innovation Sample of the German Socioeconomic Panel

Using data from a new survey we designed for the Innovation Sample of the German Socioeconomic Panel (GSOEP), we document the relationship between marital sorting and intra-household decision-making, with a focus on consumption allocations and employment changes due to having children. Our rst main nding is that most households in our sample (72%) split private consumption equally between partners, ...

Participation in socio-cultural activities and subjective well-being of natives and migrants: evidence from Germany and the UK

Within the diverse populations characterizing the modern society, it is essential to explore the experiences of multicultural individuals and their subjective well-being. The aim of this study is to explore the participation of migrants in socio-cultural activities related to arts, theatre, concerts and sports events and its role in their subjective well-being (SWB). The empirical analysis relies on ...

Payroll taxation increases inequality at the top

In recent decades, the inequality of household income has increased globally. A common trend is increased income inequality at the top of the distribution. The sources of this trend are a matter of debate. Increased demand for analytical and managerial skills is said to have strongly increased labor incomes at the top. Other scholars have indicated that structural conditions, such as financialization ...

Job Satisfaction Declines in Late Work Life – A Time-to-Retirement Approach

Job satisfaction has previously been found to increase across the life span. However, few studies have focused on the very last years of working life. We applied a time-to-retirement approach to job satisfaction and investigated change in job satisfaction in the ten years before retirement in the German Socioeconomic Panel (GSOEP, n = 2,619). Job satisfaction showed a small non-linear decline as people ...

Analysis of large data sets: Bayesian methods and applications in energy and health economics

The availability of large data sets is increasing dramatically, reshaping decision-making in many domains, such as energy, education and health. Data sets may be large in two dimensions: in the number of observations and in the number of variables. This thesis mainly deals with the first case. Often, large data sets arise as a byproduct of emerging technologies, possibly allowing very detailed measurements ...

The Costs and Benefits of Mindfulness and Reappraisal in Daily Life

Reappraisal and mindfulness represent two fundamentally different but interconnected ways of dealing with one’s emotions: whereas reappraisal is aimed at changing one’s thoughts and emotions, mindfulness is aimed at not immediately changing, but appreciating them. Despite this difference, prior research has shown that both are beneficial for one’s affective well-being. However, research on the spontaneous ...

Intertemporal Choices of Children and Adults from Poor Roma Communities: A Case Study from Slovakia

Poverty may have negative consequences on people's economic behavior and literature has documented close links between time discounting and poverty. This paper investigates intertemporal choices made by children and adults from segregated Roma communities in Slovakia. The study finds that fewer children than adults prefer smaller-sooner to larger-later amounts (referred to as "quasi-impatience"). ...

Integrating Refugees and Asylum Seekers into the German Economy and Society: Empirical Evidence and Policy Objectives

Essays on Methods for Causal Inference

This dissertation consists of three papers sharing the objective to analyze how machine learning methods can be useful to economists and econometricians in their pursuit to understand causal mechanisms operating in the economy. Such causal knowledge is essential when designing policies that help achieve societal goals. ML techniques are increasingly applied in and adapted to practical policy settings. ...

Quantifying the Economic, Linguistic, and Social Benefits for Refugees Participating in a Federal German Integration Course

In 2005, the German government introduced various integration courses in order to better support migrants and refugees. Since 2010, the refugee population in Germany has exponentially increased, particularly after Chancellor Merkel’s 2015 decision to admit more than one million refugees. This study evaluates the efficacy of these integration courses by examining the extent to which participation in ...