Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Does income moderate the satisfaction of becoming a parent? In Germany it does and depends on education

We investigate the role of individual labor income as a moderator of parental subjective well-being trajectories before and after the birth of the first child in Germany. Analyzing the German Socio-Economic Panel Survey (SOEP), we found that income matters negatively for parental life satisfaction after the first birth, though with important differences by education and gender. In particular, among ...

The dynamics of solo self-employment: persistence and transition to employership

This study examines dynamics of solo self-employment. In particular, we investigate the extent of true state dependence and cross state dependence, i.e., whether experiencing solo selfemployment causally affects the probability of becoming an employer in the future. We use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to estimate dynamic multinomial logit models. Our results show that the extent of true ...

Religious Attendance Buffers the Impact of Unemployment on Life Satisfaction: Longitudinal Evidence from Germany

This research used longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) to examine whether religious attendance buffers the impact of unemployment on life satisfaction. Fixed effects models following 5,446 individuals up to three years after the transition to unemployment yielded two central findings. First, higher frequency of religious attendance was associated with smaller drops in ...

Subjective Completion Beliefs and the Demand for Post-Secondary Education

The outcome of pursuing an upper or post-secondary education degree is uncertain. A student might not complete a chosen degree for a number of reasons, such as insufficient academic preparation or financial constraints. Thus, when considering whether to invest in post-secondary education, students must factor their probability of completing the degree into their decision. We study the role of this ...

Predicting fixed effects in panel probit models

We present a method to estimate and predict fixed effects in a panel probit model when N is large and T is small, and when there is a high proportion of individual units without variation in the binary response. Our approach builds on a bias-reduction method originally developed by Kosmidis and Firth (2009) for cross-section data. In contrast to other estimators, our approach ensures that predicted fixed ...

Principles of the Just Distribution of Benefits and Burdens: The "Basic Social Justice Orientations" Scale for Measuring Order-Related Social Justice Attitudes

The paper introduces a short scale for measuring attitudes to four fundamental principles of the just distribution of benefits and burdens in a society. The Basic Social Justice Orientations (BSJO) scale is an eight-item scale that measures agreement with the equality, equity, need, and entitlement principle. In contrast to comparable other scales that have been used in justice research in the past, ...

Wages in Eastern Germany Still Considered More Unjust Than in the West

Almost 25 years after the fall of the Wall and far more eastern Germans are unhappy with their income than western Germans. In 2013, around 44 percent of employed eastern Germans rated their earnings as unfair compared with approximately one third in western Germany. Although the east-west gap has been diminishing since 2005--to around 12 percent in 2013--this is not because eastern Germans feel that ...

A Factorial Survey on the Justice of Earnings Within the SOEP-Pretest 2008

This research note describes the Factorial Survey and its implementation in the Pretest 2008 of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). The main research objective of this study was to investigate the capability of Factorial Surveys in large population surveys. Therefore, we created a vignette module that was part of the CAPI-questionnaire with 24 descriptions of fulltime employees. Respondents gave ...

The Justice of Earnings in Dual-Earner Households

The rise in female labor market participation and the growth of “atypical” employment arrangements has, over the last few decades, brought about a steadily decreasing percentage of households in which the man is the sole breadwinner, and a rising percentage of dual-earner households. Against this backdrop, the present paper investigates the impact of household contexts in which the traditional male ...

Unjust Divergence in Earnings in Germany? Many believe top executives earn too much