Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Do Parental Leaves Make the Motherhood Wage Penalty Worse?

We assess if and how motherhood wage penalties change in response to the design of parental leave regulations. Focusing on Germany, we compare sweeps of reforms inspired by opposite principles. One allowed for longer periods out of paid work in the 1990s, the other prompted quicker re-entry in the labour market in the late 2000s. These reforms may have first exacerbated and later mitigated wage losses ...

The Relationship between Family Context and Job Satisfaction: A Quantitative Investigation

This thesis provides empirical evidence on the relationship between demographic events and job satisfaction. Existing conceptualisations of job satisfaction are not fruitful for theorising the relationship between family context and job satisfaction. I develop a framework whereby job satisfaction is maximised when there are no mismatches between desired and obtained employment characteristics, while ...

Stepping Off the Hedonic Treadmill: Latent Class Analyses of Individual Differences in Response to Major Life Events

Theorists have long maintained that people react to major life events but then return to a set-point of subjective well-being. Although evidence now indicates substantial inter-individual variability in these reactions, prior research has been limited by its use of average trajectories. In this study, we used latent growth mixture modeling to identify specific patterns of individual variation in response ...

Ideology, Family Policy and Gender Economic Inequality: Different Models, Different Tradeoffs

Winners and Losers: The Consequences of Welfare State Policies for Gender Wage Inequality

Cross-national studies of the impact of welfare states on gender inequality tend to overlook socioeconomic divisions among women. This paper challenges the implicit assumption that welfare states have uniform effects on the labour market attainments of all women, arguing that the impact of state intervention is necessarily conditioned by women’s relative advantage or disadvantage in the labour market. ...

The Prevalence of Welfare-State Policies and Gender Socioeconomic Inequality: A Comparative Analysis

A Class Perspective on Gender Inequalitiy: How Welfare States Shape the Gender Pay Gap

How Welfare States Shape the Gender Pay Gap: A Theoretical and Comparative Analysis

We assess the impact of the welfare state on cross-national variation in the gender wage gap. Earnings inequality between men and women is conceptualized as resulting from their different locations in the class hierarchy, combined with the severity of wage differentials between and within classes. This decomposition contributes to identifying the relevant dimensions of welfare states and testing their ...

Personality Traits and Household Consumption Choices

This study examines the role personality traits play in influencing consumption decisions for both individuals and households by means of a complete system of Engel curves. Estimations are performed on the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) using the following four different samples: single men, single women, childless couples and couples with children. Personality traits are found to moderately improve ...

Poor Glucose Regulation is Associated with Declines in Well-Being among Older Men, but not Women

Glucose regulation is a key aspect of healthy aging and has been linked to brainfunctioning and cognition. Here, we examined the role of glucose regulation for withinpersonlongitudinal trajectories of well-being. We applied growth models to data fromthe Berlin Aging Study II (N = 1,437), using insulin resistance as an index of glucoregulatorycapacity. We found that poor glucose regulation (higher insulin ...