Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Worries across time and age in the German Socio-Economic Panel study

We investigate how indicators of dissatisfaction—worries about a variety of life domains such as health, the state of the economy, and immigration—change across time and age in Germany based on Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) data. As expected, contemporary world events influenced respondents’ worries. For example, worries about peace peaked in 2003, the year of the Iraq War; worries about both immigration ...

Examining the Effects of Birth Order on Personality

This study examined the long-standing question of whether a person’s position among siblings has a lasting impact on that person’s life course. Empirical research on the relation between birth order and intelligence has convincingly documented that performances on psychometric intelligence tests decline slightly from firstborns to later-borns. By contrast, the search for birth-order effects on personality ...

Successfully Striving for Happiness: Socially Engaged Pursuits Predict Increases in Life Satisfaction

Happiness is considered a highly desirable attribute, but whether or not individuals can actively steer their lives toward greater well-being is an open empirical question. In this study, respondents from a representative German sample reported, in text format, ideas for how they could improve their life satisfaction. We investigated which of these ideas predicted changes in life satisfaction 1 year ...

Micro Income Change in the Federal Republic of Germany between 1984 and 1989

Self-employment, Internal Migration and Place Embeddedness

Little is known about the individual location behaviour of self-employed entrepreneurs. Population geography has not researched this issue and entrepreneurship literature has given it little attention. This paper examines whether self-employed entrepreneurs are ‘rooted’ in place and also whether those who are more rooted in place are more likely to enter self-employment, thereby shedding new light ...

Testing the ‘Residential Rootedness’-Hypothesis of Self-Employment for Germany and the UK

Based on the notion that entrepreneurship is a ‘local event’, the literature argues that entrepreneurs are ‘rooted’ in place. This paper tests the ‘residential rootedness’ hypothesis of self-employment by examining for Germany and the UK whether the self-employed are less likely to move over long distances (internal migration) than workers in paid employment. Using longitudinal data from the German ...

Long Maternal Leaves and The Gender Wage Gap (thesis)

This article examines the effect of long parental leave policies on the gender wage gap. I analyze the general equilibrium consequences of the introduction of generous job-protected parental leaves on female wages and female labor force composition. My evidence supports the hypothesis that generous child support for families can be costly for firms; and moreover, that these costs are passed on to women ...

Is Occupational Mobility in Germany Hampered by the Dual Vocational System? The Results of a British-German Comparison

We compare occupational mobility in Germany and Britain and focus on the effects of the German dual vocational system. Based on a comparison of mobility rates for different occupations within each country and between the two countries, we find that mobility is particularly low in German apprenticeship occupations and conclude that the dual system impedes occupational changes. However, German mobility ...

The Temporal Welfare State: A Crossnational Comparison

Personality Has Minor Effects on Panel Attrition

In light of the recent interest in using longitudinal panel data to study personality development, it is important to know if personality traits are related to panel attrition. We analyse the effects of personality on panel drop-out separately for an ‘older’ subsample (started in 1984), a relatively ‘young’ subsample (started in 2000), and a ‘new’ subsample (started in 2009) of the German Socio-Economic ...