Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Does the German Minimum Wage Help Low Income Households?: Evidence from Observed Outcomes and the Simulation of Potential Effects

Does the federal minimum wage in Germany introduced in 2015 improve the income situation of low income households and reduce in-work poverty? Previous literature on its distributional impact was either focused on earnings and hourly wages (e.g. Caliendo et al., 2017), or is based on ex-ante simulations (e.g. Müller and Steiner, 2013). This paper provides systematic descriptive ex-post evidence on the ...

A test of risk vulnerability in the wider population

Panel data from the German SOEP is used to test for risk vulnerability (RV) in the wider population. Two different survey responses are analysed: the response to the question about willingness-to-take risk in general and the chosen investment in a hypothetical lottery. A convenient indicator of background risk is the VDAX index, an established measure of volatility in the German stock market. This ...

A latent class growth model for migrants’ remittances: an application to the German Socio-Economic Panel

We propose a latent class mixture growth model with concomitant variables to study the time profiles of international remittances sent by first-generation migrants in Germany from 1996 to 2012. The latent class approach enables us to identify homogeneous subgroups of migrants associated with different trajectories for their remitting behaviour, which can be interpreted in the light of the theoretical ...

Personality Traits and Obesity

Objective: Previous studies investigating the association between body weight and personality traits have found mixed results. This paper uses a large data set and two different study designs (cross-sectional and longitudinal) to provide more consistent estimates of the effect of personality traits on obesity. Methods: The present study is based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) ...

The relationship between age and subjective well-being: Estimating within and between effects simultaneously

In this paper, we employ a correlated random effects econometric framework to simultaneously estimate the within and between effects of age on subjective well-being based on longitudinal survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). The proposed approach helps to explain differing findings on the relationship between age and subjective well-being reported in a series of studies based on ...

Do retirement savings increase in response to information about retirement and expected pensions?

How can retirement savings be increased? We explore a unique policy change in the context of the German pension system to study this question. As of 2005 (with a phase-in period between 2002 and 2004), the German pension administration started to send out annual letters providing detailed and comprehensible information about the pension system and individual expected public pension payments. This reform ...

The German Federal Government’s 5th Report on Poverty and Wealth (Executive Summary

Do Women Respond to Changes in Family Policy? A Quasi-Experimental Study of the Duration of Mothers’ Employment Interruptions in Germany

Based on a sequence of policy changes in Germany’s parental leave programme, the article uses an interrupted time-series design to provide empirical evidence on the relationship between mothers’ labour force behaviour and family policy. Using event history modelling techniques and 1984–2010 data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, the analysis shows that mothers have strongly responded to various ...

Analyzing the Employment Status with Panel Data from the GSOEP. A Comparison of the MECOSA and the GEE1 Approach for Marginal Models

The Generalised Estimating Equations - A Comparison of Procedures Available in Commercial Statistical Software Packages

The Generalised Estimating Equations (GEE) proposed by Liang and Zeger (1986) and Zeger and Liang (1986) have found considerable attention in the last decade (for an overview see e.g. Ziegler, and Blettner, 1998). Several self-made programs for solving the GEE are available. This paper presents a comparison of three GEE procedures that are already available in SAS PROC GENMOD, STATA procedure XTGEE ...