Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Do the Elderly Reduce Housing Equity? An International Comparison

Studying Justice: Measurement, Estimation, and Analysis of the Actual Reward and the Just Reward

Is Within-Individual Variation in Personality Traits Associated with Changes in Health Behaviours? Analysis of Seven Longitudinal Cohort Studies

Personality traits are related to health behaviours, but it is unknown whether changes in personality would lead to changes in health behaviours. We examined whether naturally occurring, within-individual variation in personality traits over time is associated with corresponding changes in smoking, physical activity, alcohol consumption, and body mass index. Data were from seven longitudinal cohort ...

The Empirical Content of the Job Search Model: Labor Mobility and Wage Distributions in Europe and the US

How Does Heterogeneity Shape the Socioeconomic Gradient in Health Satisfaction?

Individual heterogeneity plays a key role in explaining variation in self-reported well-being and, in particular, health satisfaction. It is hypothesised that the influence of this heterogeneity varies over levels of health and increases over the life-cycle. These hypotheses are tested with data on health satisfaction from 22 waves of the German Socioeconomic Panel (GSOEP).Nonlinear fixed effects methods ...

Socio-economic inequalities in bodily pain over the lifecycle: Longitudinal evidence from Australia, Britain and Germany

We document the extent of socio-economic status (SES) inequalities in bodily pain in Australia, Britain and Germany, with a particular focus on whether such inequalities widen over the life course. Random-effects logistic and kernel regressions are used to estimate odds ratios of experiencing severe pain by income, educational qualification and occupational status, and to graph age–pain profiles, while ...

Research Indicates Happiness is Not Just Gene Deep

Stability and Change in Risk-Taking Propensity Across the Adult Life Span

Can risk-taking propensity be thought of as a trait that captures individual differences across domains, measures, and time? Studying stability in risk-taking propensities across the life span can help to answer such questions by uncovering parallel, or divergent, trajectories across domains and measures. We contribute to this effort by using data from respondents aged 18 to 85 in the German Socio-Economic ...

Income Distribution and the Business Cycle in Germany: A Semiparametric Approach

The question of how the distribution of income is influenced by the state of the economy is important for understanding the economic mechanisms linking micro- and macro-level variables. There is no generally applicable theory on how the distribution of household incomes is influenced by changed macroeconomic conditions. This paper adapts an empirical approach in order to investigate this relationship ...

A Satisfaction-Driven Poverty Indicator - A Bustle Around the Poverty Line

Poverty line definitions in use often lack a solid scientific foundation. This paper proposes to exploit data on income satisfaction to construct an evidence-based poverty line. The poverty line is identified by using its assumed unique property to explain income dissatisfaction best among all dichotomizations of income. To this end, several model settings are considered including linear and nonlinear ...