Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Flexible Work Time in Germany: Do Workers Like It and How Have Employers Exploited It Over the Cycle?

After describing qualitatively the increasingly flexible organization of work hours in Germany, I turn to the German Socio-Economic Panel to quantify practices and trends, and assess their effects on workers and employers. Measuring flexibility as the extent to which overtime is compensated with time off, and hence receives no overtime premium, I show that hourly-paid workers have undergone a regime ...

From Reunification to Economic Integration: Productivity and the Labor Market in East Germany

Naming Differences in Divided Germany

This article analyzes differences in naming between East and West Germany. After World War II, Germany was split by the allied forces. Two Germanies emerged: the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The country’s division lasted about forty years (1949–1989), a time span in which vastly different geo-political frameworks — Eastern bloc versus Western bloc — shaped ...

Statistical Problems and Solutions in Onomastic Research – Exemplified by a Comparison of Given Name Distributions in Germany throughout the 20th Century

The German Socio Economic Panel Study (SOEP) offers the rare opportunity to look at patterns of given names amongst a representative sample of more than 50,000 people born since 1900. This article develops an exemplary picture of typical frequency distributions for given names and their developments over time. In this paper, we first discuss the advantages and limitations of various data bases which ...

Reciprocal Associations between Parenting Challenges and Parents’ Personality Development in Young and Middle Adulthood

Having children affects many aspects of people’s lives. However, it remains unclear to what degree the challenges that come along with having children are associated with parents’ personality development. We addressed this question in two studies by investigating the relationship between parenting challenges and personality development in mothers of newborns (Study 1, N = 556) and the reciprocal associations ...

Developmental Tasks as a Framework to Study Personality Development in Adulthood and Old Age

Research consistently shows that personality development is a lifelong phenomenon, with mean-level and rank-order changes occurring in all life phases. What happens during specific life phases that can explain these developmental patterns? In the present paper, we review literature linking personality development in different phases of adulthood to developmental tasks associated with these phases. ...

Survey to Reveal True Face of Chinese Society

Comparison of the effects of low childhood socioeconomic position and low adulthood socioeconomic position on self rated health in four European studies

Social Comparisons and Attitudes towards Foreigners. Evidence from the 'Fall of the Iron Curtain'

We exploit the natural experiment of German re-unification to address the question whether distress from social (income) comparisons results in negative attitudes towards foreigners. Our empirical approach rests upon East German individuals who have West German peers. We use the exogenous variation of wealth of West German peers shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall as an instrument to identify ...

Alternative Approaches for Econometric Analysis of Panel Count Data Using Dynamic Latent Class Models (With Application to Doctor Visits Data)

Cross-sectional latent class regression models, also known as switching regressions or hidden Markov models, cannot identify transitions between classes that may occur over time. This limitation can potentially be overcome when panel data are available. For such data, we develop a sequence of models that combine features of the static cross-sectional latent class (finite mixture) models with those ...