Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

The Dynamics of Assortative Mating in Germany

This paper examines the patterns of educational assortative mating in East and West Germany. In the literature it is well known that individuals do not mate randomly according to social and cultural traits. Marrying within a socio-economic group can lead to polarization and exacerbating economic inequality. In the US, there is a compelling body of evidence indicating that the educational similarity ...

Training and Exclusion: Is the German Apprenticeship System in Decline?

A step in a new direction? The effect of the parent’s money reform of 2007 on employment rates of mothers in Germany

Increasing maternal employment rates engage policies and people for decades. It is pushed but also questioned at the same time depending on whether women are regarded in first line as mothers or workers. In Germany, the male breadwinner model is traditionally favored. The parent’s money reform of 2007 is regarded as a first step towards the dual earner – dual carer model by some scholars. Compared ...

Benford's Law as an instrument for fraud detection in surveys using the data of the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)

This paper focuses on fraud detection in surveys using Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) data as an example for testing newly methods proposed here. A statistical theorem referred to as Benford's Law states that in many sets of numerical data, the significant digits are not uniformly distributed, as one might expect, but rather adhere to a certain logarithmic probability function. To detect fraud we ...

Changing from PAPI to CAPI: Introducing CAPI in a Longitudinal Study

This article examines the implications of moving to Computer-Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI) for data quality by analyzing the transition from Paper-and-Pencil (PAPI) to Computer-Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI) on a subsample of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) conducted using an “experimental design” in Wave 1. The 2,000 addresses for the sample E of SOEP were split into two subsamples ...

Individual and Neighborhood Determinants of Survey Nonresponse: An Analysis Based on a New Subsample of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), Microgeographic Characteristics and Survey-Based Interviewer Characteristics

This study examines the phenomenon of nonresponse in the first wave of a refresher sample (subsample H) of the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP). Our first step is to link additional (commercial) microgeographic data on the immediate neighborhoods of the households visited by interviewers. These additional data (paradata) provide valuable information on respondents and nonrespondents, including ...

Conversion of Non-Respondents in an Ongoing Panel Survey: The Case of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)

The results of a resurvey of non-respondents to the SOEP study carried out in 2006 show that this special effort of reinterviewing was relatively ineffective in two respects. First, the rate of successful conversions of passive to active respondents was low (less than 20 percent). Second, the composition of the longitudinal file did not improve. The same groups that showed high dropout rates in the ...

Identification, characteristics and Impact of Faked Interviews in Surveys

Characteristics and impact of faked interviews in surveys - An analysis of genuine fakes in the raw data of SOEP

Leisure and Housing Consumption after Retirement: New Evidence on the Life-Cycle Hypothesis

We revisit the alleged retirement consumption puzzle. According to the life-cycle theory, foreseeable income reductions such as those around retirement should not affect consumption. However, we first recall that given higher leisure endowments after retirement, the theory does predict a fall of total market consumption expenditures. In order not to mistake this predicted drop for a puzzle we focus ...