Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Income Comparisons among Neighbours and Life Satisfaction in East and West Germany

This paper draws on the German Socio-economic Panel Study (SOEP) to investigate whether changes in others' income are perceived differently in post-transition and capitalist societies. We find that the neighbourhood income effect for West Germany is negative and slightly more marked in neighbourhoods where the neighbours interact socially. In contrast, the coefficients on neighbourhood income ...

Neighbourhood social ties: how much do residential, physical and virtual mobility matter?

Following up on the prediction by classical sociological theorists that neighbours will become irrelevant as societies become more mobile, this research examines the strength of people’s social ties with neighbours and the associations thereof with residential, physical and virtual mobility using longitudinal data for Germany. Unlike previous studies, the research considers the three forms of mobility ...

Keeping up with the Schmidts - An Empirical Test of Relative Deprivation Theory in the Neighbourhood Context

We test empirically whether people’s life satisfaction depends on their relative income position in the neighbourhood, drawing on a unique dataset, the German Socioeconomic Panel Study (SOEP) matched with micro-marketing indicators of population characteristics. Relative deprivation theory suggests that individuals are happier the better their relative income position in the neighbourhood is. To test ...

Determinants of institutionalization in old age

Labor Market Status and Transitions During the Pre-Retirement Years: Learning from International Differences

Mommies’ Girls Get Dresses, Daddies’ Boys Get Toys: Gender Preferences in Poland and their Implications

We examine the relationship of child gender with family and economic outcomes using a large dataset from the Polish Household Budgets’ Survey (PHBS) for years 2003-2009. Apart from studying the effects of gender on family stability, fertility and mothers’ labor market outcomes, we take advantage of the PHBS’ detailed expenditure module to examine effects of gender on consumption patterns. We find that ...

Skewed, Persistent and High before Death: Medical Spending in Germany

We use claims panel data from a big German private health insurer to provide detailed individual-level evidence on medical spending between 2005 and 2011. This includes evidence on the distribution of medical spending, the dependence of medical spending on age and other demographic characteristics, its persistence, and how medical spending evolves in the years before death. Our main findings are that ...

Fast Methods for Jackknifing Inequality Indices

The jackknife is a resampling method that uses subsets of the original database by leaving out one observation at a time from the sample. The paper outlines a procedure to obtain jackknife estimates for several inequality indices with only a few passes through the data. The number of passes is independent of the number of observations. Hence, the method provides an efficient way to obtain standard ...

Social Jealousy and Stigma: Negative Externalities of Social Assistance Payments in Germany

This paper examines the role of social assistance payments (SAP or Sozialhilfe) in determining levels of life satisfaction in Germany using the SOEP 1995-2004. We find strong evidence that individuals in Germany are negatively influenced by increased SAP payments controlling for income, whether or not they actually receive such payments (stigma and social jealousy). While there are obvious benefits ...

You're Fired! The Causal Negative Effect of Entry Unemployment on Life Satisfaction

This paper examines the impact of unemployment on life satisfaction for Germany 1984–2006, using a sample of men and women from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Across the board we find large significant negative effects for unemployment on life satisfaction.This paper expands on previous cornerstone research from Winkelmann and Winkelmann (1998) and explicitly identifies truly exogenous unemployment ...