Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

New Directions in Life Course Research

Life courses are studied in sociology and neighboring fields as developmental processes, as culturally and normatively constructed life stages and age roles, as biographical meanings, as aging processes, as outcomes of institutional regulation and policies, as demographic accounts, or as mere empirical connectivity across the life course. This review has two aims. One is to report on trends in life ...

Life Satisfaction and Relative Income - Perceptions and Evidence

Using a unique dataset we study both the actual and self-perceived relationship between subjective well-being and income comparisons against a wide range of potential comparison groups, enabling us to investigate a broader range of questions than in previous studies. In questions inserted into a 2008 module of the German-Socio Economic Panel Study we ask subjects to report (a) how their income compares ...

Unobserved Heterogeneity and Risk in Wage Variance: Does Schooling Provide Earnings Insurance?

We apply a recently proposed method to disentangle unobserved heterogeneity from risk in returns to education to data for the USA, the UK and Germany. We find that in residual wage variation, uncertainty by far dominates unobserved heterogeneity. The relation between uncertainty and level of education is not monotonic and differs among countries.

Child Care Center Quality: Measurement Issues and Links to Child Developmental Outcomes

Dual Embeddedness: Informal Job Matching and Labor Market Institutions in the United States and Germany

Drawing on the embeddedness, varieties of capitalism and macrosociological life course perspectives, we examine how institutional arrangements affect network-based job finding behaviors in the United States and Germany. Analysis of cross-national survey data reveals that informal job matching is highly clustered among specific types of individuals and firms in the United States, whereas it is more ...

Consumer Bankruptcy: A Fresh Start

Family Separation and Refugee Mental Health: a Network Perspective

How do the structure and relational features of family networks affect refugees’ mental health after migration, particularly when refugees are geographically separated from their family? Using the first wave of the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees, which is representative of the population of refugees who arrived in Germany between 2013 and 2016, this study finds that the size of the nuclear family ...

Job insecurity is associated with adult asthma in Germany during Europe's recent economic crisis: a prospective cohort study

Background Job insecurity has been identified as a risk factor for adverse health outcomes. Perceptions of job insecurity steeply increased during Europe's recent economic downturn, which commenced in 2008. The current study assessed whether job insecurity was associated with incident asthma in Germany during this period.Methods We used prospective data from the German Socio-Economic Panel for ...

The association of effort–reward imbalance and asthma: findings from two cross-sectional studies

Purpose: There is evidence to suggest that work stress is positively associated with the occurrence of asthma. A limitation is that the small number of prior studies utilized unestablished work stress measures, thus constraining interpretation and generalizability. The present study re-examined this association by assessing work stress based on the well-established effort–reward imbalance (ERI) model.Methods: ...

Educational Poverty in a Comparative Perspective: Theoretical and Empirical Implications