Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Family and Gender Still Matter: The Heterogeneity of Returns to Education in Germany

The Effect of Relative Standing on Considerations About Self-Employment

This paper uses unique German data to examine the effects of the relative standing on the individual propensity to become self-employed in the next two years. The results suggest that the relationship between relative wage positions and propensity to become self-employed is U-shaped. This is interpreted as evidence that low status translates into entrepreneurial motivation for workers in low relative ...

My Wage is Unfair! Just a Feeling or Comparison with Peers?

This paper descriptively analyzes the nexus between income comparisons and perceptions of unfair pay. A German household survey reveals that individuals who perceive their wages as unfair earn signicantly lower wages than fairly paid individuals with similar characteristics. This suggests that unfairness perceptions with respect to wages are based on sound income comparisons with peers. When asked ...

Determinants and Consequences of Health Behaviour: New Evidence from German Micro Data

The economic costs of chronic health conditions and severe illnesses like diabetes, coronary heart disease or cancer are immense. Several clinical trials give information about the importance of individual behaviour for the prevalence of these illnesses. Changes in health relevant behaviour may therefore lead to a decline of avoidable illnesses and related health care costs. In this context, we use ...

Health Behaviour and Health Assessment: Evidence from German Microdata

The importance of the individual’s health behaviour for the health production process is beyond controversy. Health relevant behaviour can be viewed as a key variable in the health production process. Changes in the behaviour may influence individual’s assessment of health. Following this idea, we use German microdata to identify determinants of smoking, drinking, and obesity and their impact on health. ...

Health and the Decision to Invest in Education

The paper analyses the relationship between health and education in a two period human capital framework. The resulting substitution and investment effects between health and advanced training work in opposite direction and leave open questions for the empirical part. As econometric model we use a random effects probit model for panel data. Our data consist of 322 individuals for the two years 2004 ...

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 ...

The Effects of Labour Market Participation on Fertility Decisions: Gender Differences in Cross-National Perspective (Dissertation)