Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

The Structure of Women's Employment in Comparative Perspective

Income Comparisons, Income Adaptation, and Life Satisfaction: How Robust Are Estimates from Survey Data?

Theory suggests that subjective well-being is affected by income comparisons and adaptation to income. Empirical tests of the effects often rely on self-constructed measures from survey data. This paper shows that results can be highly sensitive to simple parameter changes. Using large-scale panel data from Germany and the UK, I report cases where plausible variations in the underlying income type ...

Testing the Easterlin Hypothesis with Panel Data: The Dynamic Relationship Between Life Satisfaction and Economic Growth in Germany and in the UK

Recent studies focused on testing the Easterlin hypothesis (happiness and national income correlate in the cross-section but not over time) on a global level. We make a case for testing the Easterlin hypothesis at the country level where individual panel data allow exploiting important methodological advantages. Novelties of our test of the Easterlin hypothesis are a) long-term panel data and estimation ...

Status Attainment and Wealth in the United States and Germany

Mobility Regimes and Parental Wealth: The United States, Germany, and Sweden in Comparison

We study the role of parental wealth for children’s educational and occupational outcomes across three types of welfare states and outline a theoretical model that assumes parental wealth to impact offspring’s attainment through two mechanisms, wealth’s purchasing function and its insurance function. We argue that welfare states can limit the purchasing function of wealth, for instance by providing ...

Risk Aversion and Sorting into Public Sector Employment

This research note uses two German datasets – the large-scale German Socioeconomic Panel and unique data from own student questionnaires – to analyse the relationship between risk aversion and the choice for public sector employment. Main results are (1) more risk-averse individuals sort into public sector employment, (2) the impact of career-specific and unemployment risk attitudes is larger than ...

Cyclical Absenteeism among Private Sector, Public Sector and Self-employed Workers

This research note analyzes differences in the number of absent working days and doctor visits and in their cyclicality between private sector, public sector and self-employed workers. For this purpose, I used large-scale German survey data for the years 1995 to 2007 to estimate random effects negative binomial (count data) models. The main findings are as follows. (i) Public sector workers have on ...

Life satisfaction and the consumption values of partners and friends: Empirical evidence from German panel survey data

This empirical research note uses a large-scale household panel survey for Germany to assess the consumption values of partners and friends. For this purpose, reported individual life satisfaction (as proxy for utility) is regressed on being in a partnership, on the number of friends, on the net household income, and on other covariates. The results of pooled and fixed effects regressions indicate ...

Determinants of fair own wage perceptions: the moderating effect of works councils and performance evaluations

This empirical research note uses large-scale German survey data in order to analyse the determinants of fair wage perceptions. The probability to perceive the own wage as fair increases significantly with earned wages and is larger if a works council exists. Moreover, works councils and performance evaluations have a significant moderating effect on the link between the size of earned wages and fair ...

Unfair Wage Perceptions and Sleep: Evidence from German Survey Data

The author uses large-scale German survey data for the years 2009, 2011 and 2013 in order to analyze the nexus between the individual perception of being unfairly paid and measures for quantity and quality of sleep, namely, hours of sleep during workweek and during weekend, happiness with sleep, and sleep disorders diagnosed by a doctor. Main findings of the regression analysis are that workers, who ...