Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Happiness and Work

The relationship between happiness and work is subject to an ever growing empirical literature in economics. The analyses are mostly based on large-scale survey data to measure subjective well-being. Whereas one large strand of research investigates the effect of job loss and becoming unemployed, another field of study focuses on the determinants of job satisfaction evolving around employment conditions, ...

Kick It Like Özil? Decomposing the Native-Migrant Education Gap

We investigate second-generation migrants and native children at several stages in the German education system to analyze the determinants of the persistent native–migrant gap. In particular, if migrant and native children shared the same socioeconomic family background, would we still observe differences in education outcomes? Applying linear and matching decomposition methods to carefully account ...

Does Cultural Heritage affect Employment decisions? - Empirical Evidence for First- and Second-Generation Immigrants in Germany

An Economic Analysis of Marital Dissolution in West-Germany

Different Contexts, Different Effects? Work Time and Mental Health in the United States and Germany

This paper takes a comparative approach to the topic of work time and health, asking whether weekly work hours matter for mental health. We hypothesize that these relationships differ within the United States and Germany, given the more regulated work time environments within Germany and the greater incentives to work long hours in the United States. We further hypothesize that German women will experience ...

Data in the Field of Adult Education and Lifelong Learning: Present Situation, Improvements and Challenges

Over the last years, political and scientific debates have stressed the growing importance of adult education. Currently important research questions call not only for data sources that collect detailed information on adult education with repeated measurements and in different cohorts, but they should also include data on other life spheres such as education and working histories, partnership and household ...

Institutions, parental selection, and locus of control

Locus of control, that is, people's perception of how much influence they have over their lives, is an important predictor for economic outcomes - earnings, health and education, to name a few. This article uses difference-in-differences analysis to investigate the importance of the institutional environment for the development of locus of control, using the fall of the Berlin Wall as exogenous ...

You don't know what you've got till it's gone! Unemployment and intertemporal changes in self-reported life satisfaction

This paper uses concurrently and - for the first time - retrospectively reported life satisfaction from the 1984 to 1987 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel to study the importance of different comparison standards for the empirical correlation of unemployment and subjective life satisfaction. It is found that unemployed individuals do not only report significantly lower concurrent satisfaction, ...

Does composition matter? Wage inequality and the demographic and educational structure of the labor force in Germany

This paper addresses the importance of compositional changes in the labor force for the development of the wage distribution. Demographic change and higher educational attainment imply a shift toward employees with more experience and/or better education. These groups are characterized by higher relative wages as well as higher within-group wage inequality. Mechanically, these compositional shifts ...

Task-Biased Changes of Employment and Remuneration: The Case of Occupations

Different empirical studies suggest that the structure of employment in the U.S. and Great Britain tends to polarise into "good" and "bad" jobs. We provide updated evidence that polarisation also occurred in Germany since the mid-1980s until 2008. Using representative panel data, we show that this trend corresponds to a task bias in employment changes: routine jobs have lost relative ...