Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Dynamic networks of social contact, social desire, and affect across time scales

Social relationships are central to well-being because they fulfill social affiliation needs. To explain how social needs are regulated, theories describe daily-life processes among social desire, social contact, and affect. Still, these processes remain empirically underexplored because of their complexity. In this study, we estimated multivariate associations of social desire and affect with social ...

Rising Educational Divides in Attitudes: How Polarization across Cohorts Can Mask Age-Related Polarization

The question of whether attitudes become more polarized over time has stimulated significant scientific and political debate. This study is the first to show that polarization processes can occur both across cohorts and with rising age and that cohort-based polarization may obscure age-related polarization. I introduce the age polarization and cohort polarization hypotheses, which propose that attitudes ...

The value of a park in crises: Quantifying the health and wellbeing benefits of green spaces using exogenous variations in use values

Most people consider parks important for their quality of life, yet systematic causal evidence is missing. We exploit exogenous variations in their use values to estimate causal effects. Using a representative household panel with precise geographical coordinates of households linked to satellite images of green spaces with a nationwide coverage, we employ a spatial difference-in-differences design, ...

The Rollercoaster of Subjective Well-Being in Times of Multiple Crises: Evidence of Five Waves of Bi-Annual Panel Data of FReDA Survey

In times of polycrisis, such as COVID-19, the Russian war against Ukraine, and inflation, fear and uncertainties challenge many people. While the impact of the pandemic on subjective well-being was thoroughly studied, the medium-term effects and impacts of more recent crises are still to be observed. Based on the first five waves of the bi-annual (and once tri-annual) large-scale panel FReDA, we show ...

The Affective Well-Being of Ukrainian Refugees in Germany: Evidence from Five Waves of Representative Panel Data

As a result of the Russo-Ukrainian war, several million Ukrainians fled, more than one million to Germany. Until now, most studies on mental health of Ukrainian refugees are cross-sectional and there is a clear need to observe their well-being. We employed five waves of the IAB-BiB/FReDA-BAMF-SOEP (later BiB/FReDA) Survey on Ukrainian Refugees in Germany analyzing affective balance, starting shortly ...

Response Bias in the Gender Gap in Non-Market Work

Despite increasing female labor force participation, gender differences in non-market work, such as housework and childcare, persist. By exploiting exogenous variation in the questionnaire of the German Socio-Economic Panel, I analyze how response behavior affects estimates of time use in a longitudinal setting. I find a causal impact of questionnaire design on the reported hours of non-market work ...

Manifestations of (Mis)Recognition Amongst Germany-based Refugee Women from Ukraine

This research focuses on 10 case studies drawn from a corpus of 50 interviews with displaced Ukrainian women based in Berlin and Frankfurt/Oder and considers the extent to which Ukrainian refugee women arriving in Germany over the last two years might have experienced misrecognition within their everyday experiences. Following Honneth’s (1996) understanding of recognition in terms of self-confidence, ...

Personality Traits and the Likelihood of Self-Employment: A Journey into the Crafts’ Way of Doing Business

Given the renewed scholarly interest in the crafts, this paper explores the nuances of crafts entrepreneurship through a personality-based approach. Our findings validate prior research on the general influence of broad and narrow personality traits on self-employment. However, our analysis also suggests that certain effects differ between crafts and non-crafts, most notably the role of the Big Five ...

Non-Formal Education and Life Satisfaction

Terrorism and Voting: The Rise of Right-Wing Populism in Germany

Can right-wing terrorism increase support for far-right populist parties, and if so, why? Exploiting quasi-random variation between successful and failed attacks across German municipalities, we find that successful attacks lead to significant increases in the vote share for the right-wing, populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party. Our results are predominantly observable in state (Bundesland) ...