Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Institutions, culture and migrants’ preference for state-provided welfare. Longitudinal evidence from Germany

Using the difference-in-differences estimator and data provided by the German Socio-Economic Panel, this article explores migrants’ preferences for state-provided welfare. The study finds evidence that over time, the preferences of immigrants and natives become more similar. We interpret this finding as evidence that the culture of home countries does not have a time-invariant effect, and that immigrants’ ...

Hundred days of cognitive training enhance broad cognitive abilities in adulthood: findings from the COGITO study

We examined whether positive transfer of cognitive training, which so far has been observed for individual tests only, also generalizes to cognitive abilities, thereby carrying greater promise for improving everyday intellectual competence in adulthood and old age. In the COGITO Study, 101 younger and 103 older adults practiced six tests of perceptual speed (PS), three tests of working memory (WM), ...

Keeping It Steady: Older Adults Perform More Consistently on Cognitive Tasks Than Younger Adults

People often attribute poor performance to having bad days. Given that cognitive aging leads to lower average levels of performance and more moment-to-moment variability, one might expect that older adults should show greater day-to-day variability and be more likely to experience bad days than younger adults. However, both researchers and ordinary people typically sample only one performance per day ...

Political Participation / National Election Study

The chapter gives an overview of recent developments within participation and electoral research, and discusses the current state of affairs with regard to data provision and access. It concludes with several recommendations: (a) to tag a small number of key political variables as constant elements of the future question programmes of both the ALLBUS and the GSOEP, thereby creating substantial amounts ...

The Influence of Life-Cycle Events on Partisanship: Long-term Evidence from The German Socio-Economic Panel

Shaky attachments: Individual-level stability and change of partisanship among West German voters, 1984 - 2001

Do Optional Deductibles Reduce the Number of Doctor Visits? Empirical Evidence with German Data

Deductibles in health insurance are often regarded as a means to contain health care costs when individuals exhibit moral hazard. However, in the absence of moral hazard, voluntarily chosen deductibles may instead lead to self-selection into different insurance contracts. We use a set of new variables in the German Socioeconomic Panel for the years 2002, 2004, and 2006 that measure individual health ...

Insurance State and the Number of Doctor Visits. A Latent Class Panel Approach with German Data

Reducing the Number of Doctor Visits by Supply-Side Regulations

We analyze the effect of the introduction of a fixed budget for the ambulatory care sector in 1993, the introduction of individual practice budgets in 1997, and the tightening of the budget in real terms thereafter on the lengths of treatments of patients using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel over the period from 1985 to 2006. With a random effects-type two-part model in a difference-in-differences ...

Risk aversion, health behaviour, and adverse selection in the German market for private supplementary health insurance