Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Some Contributions of Economics to the Study of Personality

This paper synthesizes recent research in economics and psychology on the measurement and empirical importance of personality skills and preferences. They predict and cause important life outcomes such as wages, health, and longevity. Skills develop over the life cycle and can be enhanced by education, parenting, and environmental influences to different degrees at different ages. Economic analysis ...

Suddenly a Stay-At-Home Dad? Short- and Long-term Consequences of Fathers’ Job Loss on Time Investment in the Household

Commonly described as the “gender care gap”, there is a persistent gender difference in the division of domestic responsibilities in most developed countries. We provide novel evidence on the short- and long-run effects of an exogenous shock on paternal availability, through a job loss, on the allocation of domestic work within couples. We find that paternal child care and housework significantly increase ...

Do Gender-role Values Matter? Explaining New Refugee Women’s Social Contact in Germany

This article investigates whether gender-role values are linked to refugee women’s social contact in Germany. By building on the “preferences–third parties–opportunities” framework, we explicate a direct and an indirect path through which gender-role values may be related to refugee women’s minority-majority, intra-minority, and inter-minority contact. By applying median regressions, marginal structural ...

COVID-19: A Crisis of the Female Self-Employed

We investigate how the economic consequences of the pandemic and the government-mandated measures to contain its spread affect the self-employed — particularly women — in Germany. For our analysis, we use representative, real-time survey data in which respondents were asked about their situation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings indicate that among the self-employed, who generally face a higher ...

Heterogeneity in Marginal Returns to Language Training of Immigrants

Die Studie untersucht den Effekt von Sprachkursen auf Beschäftigung und Löhne von Immigranten. Die Identifikation basiert auf einer Instrument-Variable, die exogene Variation in der regionalen Verfügbarkeit von Sprachkursen nutzt. Anhand dieses Instruments werden marginale Treatment-Effekte (MTE) entlang der Verteilung beobachtbarer und unbeobachtbarer Variablen geschätzt. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass ...

The macroeconomic effects of social security contributions and benefits

A narrative dataset of legislative social security shocks is constructed for Germany. The dataset covers major legal changes in benefits and contributions from 1970 to 2018. We estimate their macroeconomic effects in a proxy SVAR. The GDP response to a cut in contributions yields a fiscal multiplier of about 0.4 on impact that fades relatively quickly. For benefit increases the impact multiplier is ...

Editing and Multiple Imputation of Item-Non-Response in the 2002 Wealth Module of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)

A happy choice: wellbeing as the goal of government

In this article, we lay out the basic case for wellbeing as the goal of government. We briefly review the history of this idea, which goes back to the ancient Greeks and was the acknowledged ideal of the Enlightenment. We then discuss possible measures on which a wellbeing orientation could be based, emphasizing the importance of acknowledging the political agency of citizens and thus their own evaluations ...

How Elastic is the Labour Supply of Female Migrants Relative to the Labour Supply of Female Natives?

This study estimates the wage elasticities of migrants and natives by using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 1984 to 2015 and a grouping instrumental variable estimator. Female migrants who live with a partner have lower own- and cross-wage elasticities than respective female natives, and the elasticities of non-Western female migrants are insignificant. The relationship between participation ...

Old-Age Poverty: The Household Perspective

Providing a decent living standard and preventing old-age poverty are the two major challenges of pension insurance schemes. Replacement rates below the poverty line despite many years of contribution represent a major challenge for public pension schemes with respect to the systems ‘raison d’ˆetre’. The focus of the present paper turns away from individual perspective and considers household retirement ...