Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Employment Transitions in 13 European Countries: Levels, Distributions and Determining Factors of Net Replacement Rates

Linking Concurrent Self-Reports and Retrospective Proxy Reports About the Last Year of Life: A Prevailing Picture of Life Satisfaction Decline

Objective. We examined the extent to which retrospective proxy reports of well-being mirror participant self-reports at 12–24 months before death and how proxy reports of well-being change over the last year of life. We also explored the role of sociodemographic, cognitive, and health factors of both participants and proxies in moderating such associations.Method. We used retrospective proxy ratings ...

Long-Term Antecedents and Outcomes of Perceived Control

Perceived control plays an important role in shaping development throughout adulthood and old age. Using data from the adult lifespan sample of the national German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP; N > 10,000, covering 25 years of measurement), we explored long-term antecedents, correlates, and outcomes of perceived control and examined if associations differ with age. Targeting correlates and antecedents ...

Maintaining perceived control with unemployment facilitates future adjustment

Unemployment is a major challenge to individuals' development. An important personal resource to ameliorate the negative impact of unemployment may be perceived control, a general-purpose belief system. Little is known, however, about how perceived control itself changes with the experience of unemployment and what the antecedents, correlates, and consequences of such change in perceived control ...

The development of perceived control

We review research on the development of perceived control and its importance for a wide range of outcomes across the lifespan. To do so, this chapter is divided into four sections: (1) what is perceived control; (2) why is it important to study perceived control; (3) how does perceived control change across the lifespan; and (4) what leads to the development of perceived control. We conclude that ...

Resilence to major life stressors is not as common as thought

We attempted to replicate findings that “most people are resilient” following three events: spousal loss, divorce, and unemployment. We applied growth mixture models to the same longitudinal data set that has previously been used to assert that resilience is ubiquitous. When using identical model specifications as in prior studies, we found that resilient trajectories were most common, but the number ...

The Effect of Disability Onset Across the Adult Life Span

To examine whether disability has an age-differential effect on life satisfaction across the adult life span and factors that promote maintenance of life satisfaction.We applied multilevel models to 4,372 (Mage = 60, SD = 14; 47% women) individuals from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study who experienced disability over the course of the study.Disability resulted in substantial and sustained declines ...

Changes in life satisfaction when losing one's spouse: individual differences in anticipation, reaction, adaptation and longevity in the German Socio-economic Panel Study (SOEP)

Losing a spouse is among the most devastating events that may occur in people's lives. We use longitudinal data from 1,224 participants in the German Socio-economic Panel Study (SOEP) to examine (a) how life satisfaction changes with the experience of spousal loss; (b) whether socio-demographic factors and social and health resources moderate spousal loss-related changes in life satisfaction; ...

The Immigrant-Native Wage Gap in Germany Revisited

This study provides new evidence on the levels of economic integration experienced by foreigners and naturalised immigrants relative to native Germans from 1994 to 2015. We decompose the wage gap using the method for unconditional quantile regression models by employing a regression of the (recentered) influence function (RIF) of the gross hourly wage on a rich set of explanatory variables. This approach ...

Parental Leave Policies and Socio-Economic Gaps in Child Development: Evidence from a Substantial Benefit Reform Using Administrative Data

This paper examines the effects of substantial changes in paid parental leave on child development and socio-economic development gaps. We exploit a German reform from 2007 that both expanded paid leave in the first year and removed paid leave in the second year following childbirth. Higher-income households benefited relatively more from the reform than low-income households. We use administrative ...