Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Personality and the Intergenerational Transmission of Educational Attainment: Evidence from Germany

Research based in the United States, with its relatively open educational system, has found that personality mediates the relationship between parents’ and child’s educational attainment and this mediational pattern is especially beneficial to students from less-educated households. Yet in highly structured, competitive educational systems, personality characteristics may not predict attainment or ...

Measuring the Distribution of Well-Being: Why Income and Consumption Give Different Answers

Under-Utilisation of Holiday Entitlements as a Career Investment

The existing literature has provided evidence for the hypothesis that employees work unpaid overtime, because they regard it as an investment in their career. I show that the determinants of the under-utilisation of holiday entitlements in the United Kingdom and Germany are widely similar to those of unpaid overtime work. The main finding of the study is that the investment hypothesis determines this ...

Social influences on trajectories of self-rated health: evidence from Britain, Germany, Denmark and the United States

Background: We investigate social inequalities in self-rated health dynamics for working-aged adults in four nations, representing distinct welfare regime types. The aims are to: describe average national trajectories of self-rated health over a 7-year period; identify social determinants of cross-sectional and longitudinal health; and compare cross-national patterns. Methods: Data are from national ...

Residential Segregation and Socioeconomic Neighbourhood Sorting: Evidence at the Micro-neighbourhood Level for Migrant Groups in Germany

This paper assesses the residential segregation of German immigrants from Turkey, Italy, the Balkans and eastern Europe with a special focus on the link between social and ethnic segregation. Microdata from the German Socioeconomic Panel Study (SOEP) are used. A new dataset provided by the microm Micromarketing-Systeme und Consult GmbH makes accessible information on participants’ immediate residential ...

Poverty in Europe in the mid-1990s: the effectiveness of means-tested benefits

This article examines the income maintenance policies of several members of the European Union and three candidate countries: the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. It addresses the issue of the effectiveness of these policies and especially means-tested safety nets in alleviating poverty. To assess the effectiveness of the policies, we use data from the Luxembourg Income Study. We analyse the incidence ...

Long-distance spatial mobility in Western Germany. A comparison between minorities of Turkish ancestry and native Germans

This paper examines the spatial mobility incentives and constrains of minorities of Turkish ancestry compared to natives between counties in Western Germany based on 10 waves (2000-2009) of the SOEP. Given that ethnic groups systematically differ from natives in characteristics like risk aversion due to their international migration experience, it has been assumed that regarding internal migration ...

Internal Migration of Immigrants: Evidence from Western Germany

This paper deals with the internal migration patterns of the immigrant population in Germany and addresses the question of whether immigrants are more mobile than native Germans and to what extent the differences in spatial mobility behavior between immigrants and native Germans are influenced by (a) individual level characteristics and (b) the regional economic and social context background. The analysis ...

Panel Survey Recruitment With or Without Interviewers? Implications for Nonresponse, Panel Consent, and Total Recruitment Bias

Panel surveys are increasingly experimenting with the use of self-administered modes of data collection as alternatives to more expensive interviewer-administered modes. As data collection costs continue to rise, it is plausible that future panel surveys will forego interviewer administration entirely. We examine the implications of this scenario for recruitment bias in the first wave of a panel survey ...

Sampling the Ethnic Minority Population in Germany. The Background to “Migration Background”

The paper discusses techniques for sampling the “migrant background” population in Germany, which comprises all first-generation immigrants, all non-citizens born in Germany, and all children with at least one parent fulfilling one of these criteria. Random walk sampling and random digit dialing techniques are feasible for sampling this population as a whole, but inefficient for subgroups. Telephone ...