Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Examining the Effects of Birth Order on Personality

This study examined the long-standing question of whether a person’s position among siblings has a lasting impact on that person’s life course. Empirical research on the relation between birth order and intelligence has convincingly documented that performances on psychometric intelligence tests decline slightly from firstborns to later-borns. By contrast, the search for birth-order effects on personality ...

Successfully Striving for Happiness: Socially Engaged Pursuits Predict Increases in Life Satisfaction

Happiness is considered a highly desirable attribute, but whether or not individuals can actively steer their lives toward greater well-being is an open empirical question. In this study, respondents from a representative German sample reported, in text format, ideas for how they could improve their life satisfaction. We investigated which of these ideas predicted changes in life satisfaction 1 year ...

RZOO: Efficient Storage and Retrieval of Social Science Data

Changes in Job Stability: Evidence from Lifetime Job Histories

We use lifetime job histories from the pension records to evaluate changes in job stability in Finland between 1963 and 2004. We specify a duration model and estimate the effects of elapsed duration, age, and calendar time on the hazard of job ending using individual-level panel data spanning over four decades. We find that this hazard increased during the recession years in the early 1990s but has ...

Dependent Self-Employment as a Way to Evade Employment Protection Legislation

This paper examines whether the strictness of employment protection legislation encourages employers to contract out work to their own paid employees by the formula of dependent self-employment, while making transitions to independent selfemployment less likely by altering the relative valuation of risk between salaried work and selfemployment in favour of the former. In conducting this analysis, discrete ...

Unemployment and Health: An Analysis by Means of Better Data and Improved Methodology (Dissertation)

Effects of short- and long-term unemployment on health satisfaction: evidence from German data

Why Are Women Delaying Motherhood in Germany?

German fertility trends show that the average age at which women have their first child has increased in recent decades. Moreover, researchers have argued that delayed maternity is an important factor in reduced fertility. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), this paper contributes to the debate about maternity timing and reduced fertility in Germany by analyzing some of the factors ...

Do older workers earn more than they deserve?

SOEP as a Source for Research on Ageing - Issues, Measures and Possibilities for Improvement