Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Essays on the Gender- and Part-Time Wage Gap: A Distributional Approach

Childcare Workers Experience Many Stressors and Little Recognition

Childcare workers are essential for both families and society at large, and their working conditions and pay are often a topic of discussion. Using new data spanning until the end of 2019 from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) as well as a special SOEP additional survey in day care centers, this report shows how childcare workers view their occupation, day-to-day work, and pay. According to the data, ...

Self-fulfilling prophecies in the classroom: Teacher expectations, teacher feedback and student achievement

This study investigated the link between teacher expectations and student learning, relying on longitudinal data from 64 classrooms and 1026 first-grade students in Germany. Further, based on a subsample of 19 classrooms with 354 students, we explored the mediating role of three characteristics of teacher feedback rated in video-recorded school lessons. The results showed that teacher expectations ...

20 Years of the Riester Pension—Personal Retirement Provision Requires Reform

Introduced 20 years ago as a part of the 2001 pension reform, the Riester pension is meant to function as an essential component of the German pension system with the aim of compensating for decreasing public pensions. However, data collected by the SOEP show that this objective has not yet been achieved. For ten years, use of the Riester pension plan has been stagnating at around 25 percent of the ...

Need for Long-Term Care Depends on Social Standing

The poor have a significantly shorter life expectancy than the wealthy. Using data from the Socio-Economic Panel, this Weekly Report shows that poorer people become in need of care earlier in life and more often. In addition, blue-collar workers have a higher risk of requiring care than civil servants, as do people with high job strain compared to those with low job strain. The risk of dependence on ...

Wealth accumulation and retirement preparedness in cross-national perspective: A gendered analysis of outcomes among single adults

Wealth is an increasingly important dimension of economic well-being and is attracting rising attention in discussions of social inequality. In this article, we compare – within and across countries – wealth outcomes, and link those to both employment-related factors and policy solutions that have the potential to improve wealth creation and retirement security for women. By constructing country-specific ...

Four essays on the socio-economic causes and consequences of individual health as well as public health crises Vier Aufsätze zu den sozioökonomischen Ursachen und Folgen der individuellen Gesundheit sowie der öffentlichen Gesundheitskrisen

Inequalities in health are a prevalent feature of societies. And as societies, we condemn inequalities that are rooted in immutable circumstances such as gender, race, and parental background. Consequently, policy makers are interested in measuring and understanding the causes of health inequalities rooted in circumstances. However, identifying causal estimates of these relationships is very ambitious ...

Does Contact with Foreigners Reduce Worries about Immigration? A Longitudinal Analysis in Germany

This article examines how contact with perceived foreigners affects natives’ attitudes towards immigration. Using six waves of individual level panel data from Germany (2007–2017), we find that natives’ reported mutual visits with foreigners reduce worries about immigration. However, the results do not imply an increase in this effect in the course of repeated contact. Our analyses also consider the ...

The Case of Deutsche Telekom: How Stock Market Crashes Can Persistantly Affect Household Investment Decisions

Since decades, only one fourth of German households invest in shares. One exception was during the three IPOs from 1996 to 2000 of the Deutsche Telekom, which gave Germans a taste to enter the stock market. However, the fall in the share price shortly after the second IPO, followed by corruption scandals of the company, put an end to their enthusiasm. The present study based on SOEP data shows that ...

Does private health insurance prevent the onset of critical illness and disability in a universal public insurance system?

There are numerous studies investigating the effect of health insurance on healthcare utilisation, but there is little empirical evidence examining the effect of private health insurance on objective health outcomes in a universal public health system. Tracking each individual’s health status using panel data, we explore whether there is a difference in the probability of contracting a critical illness ...