Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Risk Aversion and Trade Union Membership

If trade unions provide only their members with insurance against income variations, as a private good, this insurance will provide a stronger incentive for more risk-averse employees to become union members. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and various direct measures of individual risk attitudes, we find robust evidence of a positive relationship between risk aversion and the ...

Direct Evidence on Income Comparisons and Subjective Well-Being

Subjective well-being (SWB) is generally argued to rise with relative income. However, direct evidence is scarce on whether and how intensively individuals undertake income comparisons, to whom they relate, and what they perceive their relative income to be. In this paper, novel data with direct information on income comparison intensity and perceived relative income with respect to predetermined reference ...

Keeping up with the Joneses: Income Comparisons and Labour Supply

We investigate whether working time is related to the intensity of income comparisons and relative income. Our simple theoretical model demonstrates that the effects of relative income concerns depend on whether an individual can choose contractual working hours and/or overtime. In the empirical analysis we rely on novel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), which contains direct information ...

Direct evidence for income comparisons and subjective well-being across reference groups

This note provides evidence for the relationship between income comparisons and subjective wellbeing (SWB), using novel German data on self-reported comparison intensity and perceived relative income for seven reference groups. We find negative correlations between comparison intensity and SWB for colleagues, people in the same occupation and friends, but not for other reference groups, such as neighbours. ...

Trade union membership and sickness absence: Evidence from a sick pay reform

In 1996, statutory sick pay was reduced for private sector workers in Germany. Using the empirical observation that trade union members are dismissed less often than non-members, we construct a theoretical model to predict how absence behaviour will respond to the sick pay reform. We show that union members may have stronger incentives (1) to be absent and (2) to react to the cut in sick pay. In the ...

Automobile access, peer effects and happiness

While happiness research in transportation is an emerging topic, this is the first study that uses the German SOEP 2003 data to study the role of peer effects in automobile access on self reported subjective well-being following the approach by Ferrer-i-Carbonell (2005). Defining peers based on age, education and location, we find that the peer’s average automobile availability has a statistically ...

Human capital depreciation during hometime

We estimate human capital depreciation rates during career interruptions due to family reasons (parental leave and household time) in male- and female-dominated occupations. If human capital depreciation due to family related career breaks is lower in female than in male occupations, this can explain occupational sex segregation because women will take the costs of future breaks into account when optimizing ...

Parenthood and Risk Preferences

This study analyzes how risk attitudes change when individuals become parents using longitudinal data for a large and representative sample of individuals. The results show that men and women experience a considerable increase in risk aversion which already starts as early as two years before becoming a parent, is largest shortly after giving birth and disappears when the child becomes older. These ...

Revisiting the complementarity between education and training – the role of job tasks and firm effects

This paper addresses the question to what extent the strong positive correlation between education and training can be attributed to differences in individual-, job- and firm-specific characteristics. The novelty of this paper is to analyze previously unconsidered characteristics, in particular, job tasks and firm-fixed effects. The results show that once job tasks are controlled for, the difference ...

Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg, LIS