Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

To what extent do fiscal regimes equalize opportunities for income aquisition among Citizens?

Measuring Income Insecurity: Analysis of Income Data from the United States, Britain and Germany

This paper seeks to measure and compare income insecurity in the United States, Great Britain and Germany using household income data from the Cross National Equivalence File (CNEF). As definitive techniques for measuring insecurity are yet to be established we present an explorative methodology based upon the volatility of incomes. Though imperfect, the method is well established in the fields of ...

Effects of Personality on the Transition into Caregiving

Recent research has emphasized the critical role of personality in the caregiving situation, but not much is known about how individual differences shape the transitions into and out of caregiving. Based on longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP, N= 14,495), we explored how personality is associated with adopting and maintaining the caregiving role. The results revealed that individuals ...

Probing Birth-Order Effects on Narrow Traits Using Specification-Curve Analysis

The idea that birth-order position has a lasting impact on personality has been discussed for the past 100 years. Recent large-scale studies have indicated that birth-order effects on the Big Five personality traits are negligible. In the current study, we examined a variety of more narrow personality traits in a large representative sample ( n = 6,500-10,500 in between-family analyses; n = 900-1,200 ...

What Else Are You Worried About?" – Integrating Textual Responses into Quantitative Social Science Research

Open-ended questions have routinely been included in large-scale survey and panel studies, yet there is some perplexity about how to actually incorporate the answers to such questions into quantitative social science research. Tools developed recently in the domain of natural language processing offer a wide range of options for the automated analysis of such textual data, but their implementation ...

Worries across time and age in the German Socio-Economic Panel study

We investigate how indicators of dissatisfaction—worries about a variety of life domains such as health, the state of the economy, and immigration—change across time and age in Germany based on Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) data. As expected, contemporary world events influenced respondents’ worries. For example, worries about peace peaked in 2003, the year of the Iraq War; worries about both immigration ...

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 ...

RZOO: Efficient Storage and Retrieval of Social Science Data

Changes in Job Stability: Evidence from Lifetime Job Histories

We use lifetime job histories from the pension records to evaluate changes in job stability in Finland between 1963 and 2004. We specify a duration model and estimate the effects of elapsed duration, age, and calendar time on the hazard of job ending using individual-level panel data spanning over four decades. We find that this hazard increased during the recession years in the early 1990s but has ...