Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Happiness: Before and After the Kids

Understanding how having children influences parents’ subjective well-being (“happiness”) has great potential to explain fertility behavior. We study parental happiness trajectories before and after the birth of a child, using large British and German longitudinal data sets. We account for unobserved parental characteristics using fixed-effects models and study how sociodemographic factors modify the ...

Income Inequalities within Couples in the Czech Republic and European Countries

This study analyses the income distribution within couples in the Czech Republic and ten European countries using the EU-SILC 2005 database. Data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) database supplement the analysis with previous period (1986–2000). Women, on average, contribute less to a couple‘s income than men. Among the included countries, within-couple income inequality tends to be lower in ...

Automatic Stabilizers and Economic Crisis: United States vs. Europe

Do Smaller Households Increase Income Inequality?

Measuring Trust: Experiments and Surveys in Contrast and Combination

Trust is a concept that has attracted significant attention in economic theory and research within the last two decades: it has been applied in a number of contexts and has been investigated both as an explanatory and as a dependent variable. In this paper, we explore the questions of what exactly is measured by the diverse survey-derived scales and experiments claiming to measure trust, and how these ...

The Relationship between Inequality and GDP Growth: an Empirical Approach

The aim of this work is to analyze the relationship between inequality and economic growth. The results obtained by previous empirical papers were mixed. Authors such as Persson and Tabellini (1991) or Alesina and Rodrik (1994), in fact, find evidence of a negative relationship between the two variables of interest; on the contrary, Li and Zou (1998) and Forbes (2000) find that greater inequality is ...

Consumption expenditures and subjective well-being: empirical evidence from Germany

The standard of living of persons and households is not only a matter of income, but ultimately depends on the level and quality of their consumption in terms of goods and services purchased. Consumption expenditures can be regarded as the result of decisions based on the demand, preferences and limited economic resources, and are thus manifestations not only of different lifestyles, but also of inequality, ...

Nationality and Education as Indicators of Success in the German Job Market

Changing health inequalities in east and west Germany since unification

Paternal unemployment during childhood: causal effects on youth worklessness and educational attainment

Using long-running data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (1984–2012), we investigate the impact of paternal unemployment on child labour market and education outcomes. We first describe correlation patterns and then use sibling fixed effects and the Gottschalk (1996) method to identify the causal effects of paternal unemployment. We find different patterns for sons and daughters. Paternal unemployment ...