Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Health Effects of Instruction Intensity: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in German High-Schools

A large literature aims to establish a causal link between education and health using changes in compulsory schooling laws. It is however unclear how well more education is operationalized by marginal increases in school years. We shed a new light on this discussion by analyzing the health effects of a reform in Germany where total years of schooling for students in the academic track were reduced ...

The Role of Firm Pensions for Job Change in Germany

Occupational Pensions, Wages, and Job Mobility in Germany

Economic Consequences of Family Break-Ups Income Before and After Family Break-Ups of Women in Germany and the United States

This paper analyzes the economic consequences of family break-ups on women’s household income using fixed effects panel regression on German (SOEP) and US American (PSID) panel data. Since Germany and the United States are two examples of opposing social models, reflected in their policy framework regarding family break-ups, country differences in the economic consequences are assumed. The cross-national ...

Economic consequences of family dissolution: Comparing Germany and the United States since the 1980s, and Married and Cohabiting Parents in Germany (dissertation)

Welfare states and policies have changed greatly over the past decades, mostly characterized by retrenchments in terms of government spending or in terms of restricted access to certain benefits. In the area of family policies, however, a lot of countries have simultaneously expanded provisions and transfers for families. Bringing together the macro analysis of policy variation and household income ...

Social Approval in a Model of Time Allocation

Social Participation over the Life Course: A Longitudinal Study of Work and Family Events

Social participation is a dynamic process that changes over the life course, while people fill different social roles as they age. Previous studies on social participation have looked at differences between age groups, but the great majority is based on cross-sectional data, with the inevitable limitations that go along with that. The first objective of this study is to provide a descriptive account ...

SOEP Wave Report 2012

2012 was an eventful year for the SOEP: The survey Families in Germany (FiD) released data collected for an overall assessment of German family policy measures for use outside the project. The SOEP Innovation Sample was expanded to almost 2,500 households. And, at the 10th SOEP User Conference, more than 80 scholars from around the world presented new research on income, education, health, and happiness. ...

Examining the Effects of Birth Order on Personality

This study examined the long-standing question of whether a person’s position among siblings has a lasting impact on that person’s life course. Empirical research on the relation between birth order and intelligence has convincingly documented that performances on psychometric intelligence tests decline slightly from firstborns to later-borns. By contrast, the search for birth-order effects on personality ...

Successfully Striving for Happiness: Socially Engaged Pursuits Predict Increases in Life Satisfaction

Happiness is considered a highly desirable attribute, but whether or not individuals can actively steer their lives toward greater well-being is an open empirical question. In this study, respondents from a representative German sample reported, in text format, ideas for how they could improve their life satisfaction. We investigated which of these ideas predicted changes in life satisfaction 1 year ...