Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

What do Subjective Well-Being Judgments Mean? Sources and Distinctions, Processes and Mechanisms

How do people decide how happy they are? In principle, a number of models are possible and the current chapter highlights three of them. People could subdivide their life into various domains, consider their progress in these domains, and then integrate the results of this bottom-up activity. Alternatively, people could omit such a systematic process and simply base their judgments on whatever information ...

Renewable Energy Adoption in Germany - Drivers, Barriers and Implications (Dissertation)

Marginal employment and health in Britain and Germany: does unstable employment predict health?

This study examines the possible health impact of marginal employment, including both temporary and part-time employment schemes. It addresses three research questions: (1) Are employed people with a fixed-term contract or no contract more likely to report poor health than those who hold jobs with permanent contracts? (2) Are part-time employed respondents (even when they hold jobs with permanent contracts) ...

The Risk Attitudes of U.S. Farmers

I compare the distribution of risk attitudes of farm owners in the United States to nonfarm business owners and the general population using a measure of risk tolerance collected from national surveys. I find that farmers are significantly more tolerant of risk than the general population, though they are significantly less tolerant of risk than nonfarm business owners. Once demographic differences ...

Risk-attitude selection bias in subject pools for experiments involving neuroimaging and blood samples

To what extent do fiscal regimes equalize opportunities for income aquisition among Citizens?

Measuring Income Insecurity: Analysis of Income Data from the United States, Britain and Germany

This paper seeks to measure and compare income insecurity in the United States, Great Britain and Germany using household income data from the Cross National Equivalence File (CNEF). As definitive techniques for measuring insecurity are yet to be established we present an explorative methodology based upon the volatility of incomes. Though imperfect, the method is well established in the fields of ...

Effects of Personality on the Transition into Caregiving

Recent research has emphasized the critical role of personality in the caregiving situation, but not much is known about how individual differences shape the transitions into and out of caregiving. Based on longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP, N= 14,495), we explored how personality is associated with adopting and maintaining the caregiving role. The results revealed that individuals ...

Probing Birth-Order Effects on Narrow Traits Using Specification-Curve Analysis

The idea that birth-order position has a lasting impact on personality has been discussed for the past 100 years. Recent large-scale studies have indicated that birth-order effects on the Big Five personality traits are negligible. In the current study, we examined a variety of more narrow personality traits in a large representative sample ( n = 6,500-10,500 in between-family analyses; n = 900-1,200 ...

What Else Are You Worried About?" – Integrating Textual Responses into Quantitative Social Science Research

Open-ended questions have routinely been included in large-scale survey and panel studies, yet there is some perplexity about how to actually incorporate the answers to such questions into quantitative social science research. Tools developed recently in the domain of natural language processing offer a wide range of options for the automated analysis of such textual data, but their implementation ...