Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

How a Universal Music Education Program Affects Time Use, Behavior, and School Attitude

It is still widely debated how non-cognitive skills can be affected by policy intervention. For example, universal music education programs are becoming increasingly popular among policy makers in Germany and other developed countries. These are intended to give children from poor families the opportunity to learn a musical instrument. Moreover, policymakers present these programs as innovative policies ...

Developing skills through non-formal learning activities: Four essays in the economics of education (Dissertation)

Chapter 2: Despite numerous studies on skill development, we know little about the effects of extracurricular music activities on cognitive and non-cognitive skills. This study examines how music training during childhood and youth affects the development of cognitive skills, school grades, personality, time use and ambition using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Our findings suggest ...

Education and vocational training of Italian Migrants in Germany - The role of family social capital in the creation of human capital

Migration networks and migration decision-making

Drawing on the rational choice approach and the economic sociology of migration, this article discusses the role of social networks in terms of location-specific social capital. It discusses relations between sociological and economic aspects of migration and outlines the influence of social capital on migration decision-making and chain migration processes. There have been various attempts to measure ...

Immigration and Attitudes Towards Day Care

We examine the relationship between preferences for the public funding of school children day care and the share of foreign pupils in German jurisdictions. To this end, we employ multilevel models to analyze individual-level data from the 1997 and 2002 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel and data on different jurisdiction-levels from official sources. In contrast to a number of recent studies ...

Do Couples Bargain over Fertility? Evidence Based on Child Preference Data

Empirical literature has found evidence in favor of household bargaining models. In contrast to earlier tests that are limited to assignable private goods, we use child preference data in order to extend the empirical evidence on household bargaining to public household goods. In the empirical analysis, we exploit the different theoretical predictions for couples with heterogeneous and homogeneous ...

Unconditional Child Benefits, Mothers’ Labor Supply, and Family Well-Being: Evidence from a Policy Reform

In many parts of the developed world, governments devote a significant share of public funds to unconditional family cash transfers in an attempt to promote the economic well-being of households. But how successful are such policies? Germany has one of the world’s most generous child benefit systems, which was subject to a major reform in the mid-1990s. This article exploits the reform using a difference-in-differences ...

Political Socialization in Flux? Linking Family Non-Intactness during Childhood to Adult Civic Engagement

Some sociologists argue that non-intact family structures during childhood have a negative effect on adult children's civic engagement, since they undermine, and in some cases prevent, the processes and activities through which parents shape their children's political attitudes and orientations. In this paper, we evaluate this hypothesis on the basis of longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic ...

Social Mobility in the 20th Century: Class Mobility and Occupational Change in the United States and Germany

Based on a novel class scheme and a unique compilation of German and American data, this book reveals that intergenerational class mobility increased over most of the past century. While country differences in intergenerational mobility are surprisingly small, gender, regional, racial and ethnic differences were initially large but declined over time. At the end of the 20th century, however, mobility ...

Class mobility across three generations in the U.S. and Germany

Based on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the Socio-economic Panel, we study the class mobility of three concurrent generations in the U.S. and Germany. We find that, in both countries, the grandfathers’ class is directly associated with their grandchildren's social position. We propose three possible mechanisms which could explain the observed multigenerational mobility patterns. ...