Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Working Life and Human Capital Investment: Causal Evidence from a Pension Reform

This paper presents a life-cycle model with human capital investment during working life through training and provides a novel empirical test of human capital theory. We exploit a sizable pension reform across adjacent cohorts in a regression discontinuity setting and find that an increase in working life increases training. We discuss and test further predictions regarding the relation between initial ...

House Price Expectations

This study examines short-, medium-, and long-run price expectations in housing markets. We derive and test six hypothesis about the incidence, formation, and relevance of price expectations. To do so, we use data from a tailored household survey, past sale and rental offerings, satellites, and from an information RCT. As novel findings, we show that price expectations exhibit mean reversion in the ...

Worker Stress and Performance Pay: German Survey Evidence

While performance pay can benefit firms and workers by increasing productivity and wages, it has also been associated with a deterioration of worker health. The transmission mechanisms for this deterioration remain in doubt. We examine the hypothesis that increased stress is one transmission mechanism. Using unique survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we find performance pay consistently ...

Health-related quality of life of individuals sharing a household with persons with dementia

Introduction: Previous research has found a negative effect of dementia on the health-related quality of life (HrQoL) of persons with dementia (PWD) and their primary informal caregivers. However, the impact of dementia on HrQoL of other individuals sharing a household with PWD has not been investigated to date. The current study therefore aimed to determine differences in the HrQoL between those sharing ...

Importance of Personality Traits for Destination-Language Acquisition: Evidence for Refugees in Germany

We analyze the role of personality traits in destination-language proficiency among recent refugees in Germany. While personality traits have been shown to predict educational outcomes, they have been largely overlooked for immigrants’ language acquisition. We extend a well-established model of destination-language proficiency and assume that personality traits’ effects manifest through the channels ...

The role of different school organizational models in the psychological adaptation of refugee adolescents

Given the high number of refugee children and adolescents around the globe, it is critical to determine conditions that foster their adaptation in the receiving country. This study investigated the psychological adaptation of recently arrived adolescent refugees in Germany. We focused on whether psychological adaptation reflects the organizational approach taken by the school that refugee adolescents ...

The Health of Catholic Order Members: A Comparison with the General Population (Chapter 3.1)

Earn More Tomorrow: Overconfident Income Expectations and Consumer Indebtedness

This paper examines whether biased income expectations due to overconfidence lead to higher levels of debt-taking. In a lab experiment, participants can purchase goods by borrowing against their future income. We exogenously manipulate income expectations by letting income depend on relative performance in hard and easy quiz tasks. We successfully generate biased income expectations and show that participants ...

Working Time Mismatch and Job Satisfaction – The Role of Employees' Time Autonomy and Gender

Evidence shows that working time mismatch, i.e. the difference between actual and desired working hours, is negatively related to employees' job satisfaction. Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we examine the potential moderating effect of working time autonomy on this relation and we also consider the corresponding role of gender. First, individual fixed effects panel ...

Insurance, Redistribution, and the Inequality of Lifetime Income

In this paper, we study how the tax-and-transfer system reduces the inequality of lifetime income by redistributing lifetime earnings between individuals with different skill endowments and by providing individuals with insurance against lifetime earnings risk. Based on a dynamic life-cycle model, we find that redistribution through the tax-and-transfer system offsets around half of the inequality ...