Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Migration and Asylum Flows to Germany: New Insights Into the Motives

This study analyzes the determinants of both total migration and asylum migration to Germany. For the analysis, a comprehensive empirical model is set up that includes climate change, economic opportunities, such as per capita income differentials, links to Germany, home country characteristics (population growth, poverty, consumer confidence, unemployment), the political and institutional situation ...

Who Opts Out? The Customisation of Marriage in the German Matrimonial Property Regime

This study examines the prevalence of marital contracts across marriage cohorts (1990–2019) in Germany. We further investigate the characteristics of spouses who signed a marital contract. Using cross-sectional data from the German Family Panel (pairfam, 2018/19), we employ complementary log–log and multinomial logistic regression models to predict the prevalence and the type of marital contracts. ...

Compensating for limited private living space through outsourcing of activities? Panel data analysis of the link between living space and spatial behaviour

In order to deal with the environmental footprint of housing, researchers call for per capita living space in high-income countries to stabilise or decrease. The concept of housing sufficiency refers to approaches that mitigate living space consumption while ensuring decent housing conditions for everyone. This study investigated, whether there is empiric evidence supporting the idea that residents ...

Oscillatory brain activity associated with skin conductance responses in the context of risk

Understanding the neural correlates of risk-sensitive skin conductance responses can provide insights into their connection to emotional and cognitive processes. To provide insights into this connection, we studied the cortical correlates of risk-sensitive skin conductance peaks using electroencephalography. Fluctuations in skin conductance responses were elicited while participants played a threat-of-shock ...

P(l)ay-As-You-Go: Large-Scale Longitudinal Risk-Elicitation in the Field

We use the on-site pump displays of a retail fuel chain to create a unique panel of over 7,000 visitors to whom we repeatedly and frequently administer an incentivized (Bomb Risk Elicitation Task) and non-incentivized (SOEP risk question) risk elicitation task over the course of four years. This new approach to data collection overcomes the challenges of user time constraints and limited control that ...

Millionaires under the microscope: Data gap on top wealth holders closed; wealth concentration higher than presumed

Individuals with assets in the millions of euros have been underrepresented in population surveys and accordingly little has been known about them. As a result, the full extent of wealth concentration in Germany was unknown. To close the existing data gap, the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) inte-grated a special sample in which individuals with high assets are overrepresented. New calculations using this ...

A Novel Sampling Strategy for Surveying High Net-Worth Individuals—A Pretest Application Using the Socio-Economic Panel

High-wealth individuals are typically underrepresented or completely missing in population surveys. The lack of comprehensive national registers on high-wealth individuals in many countries challenged previous attempts to remedy this under-representation. In a novel research design, we draw on public data on the shareholding structures of companies as a sampling frame. Our design builds on the empirical ...

Shocks and the Labor Market: Five Empirical Essays in Economics (Dissertation)

The Scarring Effects of Firm Shutdowns on Workers’ Wages: A Distributional Perspective

To shed light on the differential impact of firm shutdowns across the distribution of workers, we adopt the wage determination framework of Bonhomme, Lamadon, and Manresa (2019) to uncover workers’ unobserved types. Worker types relate to workers’ position in the wage distribution: all else equal, a higher type implies higher wages. We use the universe of social security records of Italy’s Veneto region, ...

Adverse birth outcomes and parental labor market participation after birth

Numerous articles have looked at the connection between adverse birth outcomes (low birth weight or preterm birth) and an individual's later socioeconomic status. To this day very few studies have been conducted that specifically address how delivery and adverse birth outcomes affect families and the homes where children grow up. In this study, I use data from the German Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP) ...