Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Leaving and Returning Home: A New Approach to Off-Time Transitions

Objective This study offers a new approach to off-time transitions and applies it to the link between leaving and returning home. Background It is no longer uncommon for young adults to return after having left the parental home. Previous research has mostly examined returning home in isolation from leaving home, although these two transitions are closely intertwined. Method Using longitudinal data ...

The Pleasures and Pains of Self-Employment: A Panel Data Analysis of Satisfaction with Life, Work, and Leisure

We investigate how a transition from paid employment to self-employment in the labor market influences life satisfaction. Furthermore, we consider the dynamics of work and leisure satisfaction because the balance between work and leisure is an important element of life satisfaction. Fixed-effects regressions using German Socio-Economic Panel data (1984- 2012) reveal that switching to self-employment ...

Essays on Income Mobility and Income Distribution Dynamics (Dissertation)

An anatomy of household income volatility in European countries

On the Magnitude of Income Mobility in Germany

What Lies Behind Income Mobility? Reranking and Distributional Change in Belgium, Western Germany and the USA

The Course of Subjective Well-Being over the Life Cycle

This paper deals with the relationship between subjective well-being and ageing in the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). The baseline results confirm the U-shaped relationship between life satisfaction and age, which has been found in many case studies by economists and others. Furthermore, the functional flexibility allows us to detect a second turning point later in life. Finally, some methodological ...

Panel Conditioning and Self-reported Satisfaction: Evidence from International Panel Data and Repeated Cross-sections

Using data from three European countries, this paper investigates whether self-reported satisfaction data are subject to panel conditioning or a panel effect, that is, whether answers depend on whether one has previously participated in the panel. The analysis proposes a way to account for panel attrition in cases where the attrition rate is substantial, and finds international evidence for a negative ...

A test for the convexity of human well-being over the life cycle: Longitudinal evidence from a 20-year panel

A huge cross-section literature, written by economists and others, argues that human well-being is U-shaped through the life cycle. In many cases this U-shape is robust (with a well-known exception the pattern evident in some U.S. data sets if few independent variables are included). However, a lively debate is currently ongoing about its true shape. This paper discusses the identification problem ...

A test based on panel refreshments for panel conditioning in stated utility measures

Adapting a methodology proposed in Das et al. (2011), this paper uses panel refreshments as a natural experiment to determine whether trends in stated utility measures observed in panel data are genuine or rather caused by measurement issues.