Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Does Commuting Matter to Subjective Well-Being?

How and why commuting contributes to our well-being is of considerable importance for transportation policy and planning. This paper analyses the relation between commuting and subjective well-being by considering several cognitive (e.g., satisfaction with family life, leisure, income, work, health) and affective (e.g., happiness, anger, worry, sadness) components of subjective well-being. Fixed-effects ...

Long road to ruin? Essays examining the effects of commuting on health and well-being

Flexibility and spatial mobility of labour are central characteristics of modern societies which contribute not only to higher overall economic growth but also to a reduction of interregional employment disparities. For these reasons, there is the political will in many countries to expand labour market areas, resulting especially in an overall increase in commuting. The picture of the various, unintended ...

“Is your commute really making you fat?”: The causal effect of commuting distance on height-adjusted weight

This paper explores the causal relationship between commuting distance and height-adjusted weight (BMI) in Germany, using micro-level data for the period 2004 – 2012. In contrast to previous papers, we find no evidence that longer commutes are associated with a higher BMI. The non-existence of a relationship between BMI and commuting distance prevails when physical activity and eating habits are adjusted ...

Commuting and Sickness Absence

We investigate the causal effect of commuting on sickness absence from work using German panel data. To address reverse causation, we use changes in commuting distance for employees who stay with the same employer and who have the same residence during the period of observation. In contrast to previous papers, we do not observe that commuting distances are associated with higher sickness absence, in ...

Income Inequality and Education from ECHP Data

Cross-National Estimates of the Intergenerational Mobility in Earnings

This paper examines the similarity in the association between earnings of sons and fathers in Germany and the United States. It relaxes the log-linear functional form imposed in most studies of the intergenerational earnings association. Theory implies the relationship between earnings of fathers and sons could be nonlinear, especially at the tails of the distribution of earnings of fathers. When a ...

The promise of cross-national research

Keeping it in the Family? If Parents Smoke Do Children Follow?

I use retrospective data on smokers from the German Socio-Economic Panel to investigate whether children are more likely to smoke if their parents smoke(d). Despite intense policy interest, researchers have not established whether the well-established (positive) association is causal. I exploit panel data observations on smoking behavior of parents and children to develop instrumental variables that ...

Cross-national harmonization of longitudinal data: The example of national household panels

Cross-National Comparative Research: Promises Made, Promises Kept, Promises to Keep