Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Compulsory Military Service and Personality Development

Compulsory military service is a uniformed life event disrupting the lives of young men (and sometimes women) in countries with conscription. Consequently, the development of personality and subjective well-being during service was investigated using representative population data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. In line with previous findings, men who chose military service revealed descriptively ...

The Importance of Discontinuous Female Employment for the Labour Market in West Germany

Smooth expectiles for panel data using penalized splines

Expectile regression is a topic which became popular in the last years. It includes ordinary mean regression as special case but is more general as it offers the possibility to also model non-central parts of a distribution. Semi-parametric expectile models have recently been developed and it is easy to perform flexible expectile estimation with modern software like R. We extend the model class by ...

Do(n’t) Worry, It’s Temporary: The Effects of Fixed-Term Employment on Affective Well-Being

This paper examines the impact of fixed-term employment on the affective and cognitive well-being of employees operationalized by the subjective frequency of the basic emotions of happiness, sadness, fear and anger as well as life satisfaction. Longitudinal effects were analysed across 10 waves of sampling from the Socio-Economic Panel, an annual representative survey in Germany. Random effects within ...

Transnational Activities and Immigrant Integration in Germany: Concurrent or Competitive Processes?

This book investigates both the causes and effects of transnational activities among immigrants in relation to their integration into the receiving society. It uses large scale, representative data about first and second generation immigrants in Germany. It develops a formal theoretical model, which explains both transnational involvement and paths of immigrant integration. Important questions are ...

Pathways between perceived discrimination and health among immigrants: evidence from a large national panel survey in Germany

Objective. Discrimination is an important determinant of health, and its experience may contribute to the emergence of health inequalities between immigrants and nonimmigrants. We examine pathways between perceived discrimination and health among immigrants in Germany: (1) whether perceptions of discrimination predict selfreported mental and physical health (SF-12), or (2) whether poor mental and physical ...

Unemployment and Smoking: Causation, Selection, or Common Cause? Evidence from Longitudinal Data

Background: This study investigates possible mechanisms that can explain the association between unemployment and smoking, that is a) unemployment increases smoking probability (causation), b) smoking increases the probability to become unemployed (selection), and c) differences in both smoking and unemployment probabilities trace back to differences in socio-economic position (common cause). Methods: ...

Unfair Pay and Health: The Effects of Perceived Injustice of Earnings on Physical Health

While there is ample evidence that income inequalities influence individuals’ health status, the mechanisms behind this income inequality–health correlation are only partially understood. This study shows that inequalities evaluated on the basis of individual perceptions of injustice are a driving force behind this connection. Two main questions are addressed: Does perceiving one’s earnings as unfair ...

Are Immigrants More Mobile Than Natives? Evidence from Germany

What Determines Household Saving Behavior? An Examination of Saving Motives and Saving Decisions

Saving decisions are complex, since there are many concurrent motives for saving a portion of one's income. However, while the existing literature covers all of these motives, most contributions select only one of them as a focus and relegate the others to the background by making simplifying assumptions about them. While the focus on only one saving motive is vital for many insights on aggregate ...