Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Covid-19 Pandemic: A Gender Perspective on how Lockdown Measures have affected Mothers with young Children

Allocation of humanitarian aid after a weather disaster

This paper tests whether need or political economy factors determine the allocation of humanitarian aid in the wake of the 2015/16 winter disaster in Mongolia. The identification strategy exploits the exogenous nature of the extremely cold, snowy winter and its spatial variation across Mongolia as well as the fact that the Government defined clear criteria of need across districts based on meteorological ...

The Effect of Compulsory Schooling on Vaccination Against COVID

We study the effect of education on vaccination against COVID in Germany in a sample of individuals above the age of 60. In ordinary least squares regressions, we find that, in this age group, one more year of education goes along with a 0.7 percentage point increase in the likelihood to get a COVID vaccination. In two stage least squares regressions where changes in compulsory schooling laws are used ...

The GC Wealth Project Data Warehouse v.1 – Documentation

The GC Wealth Project, a central project of the Graduate Center’s Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, is a multi-year effort aimed at expanding and consolidating access to the most up-to-date research and information on wealth, wealth inequalities, and wealth transfers and related tax policies, across countries and over time. The GC Wealth Project website — first launched in June 2023 — is organized ...

Assessing the Measurement Quality of Justice Evaluations of Earnings in Europe

How individuals perceive the fairness of their pay carries profound implications for individuals and society. Perceptions of pay injustice are linked to a spectrum of negative outcomes, including diminished well-being, poor health, increased stress, and depressive symptoms, alongside various detrimental effects in the work domain. Despite the far-reaching impact of these justice evaluations, validity ...

Personality and Cultural Income Differences Shape the Life Satisfaction Gap Between Aging Immigrants and Natives in Europe

The present study examined the size and possible sources of life satisfaction differences between immigrants and natives in a sample of over 55,000 adults (aged 50+ years) across 16 European countries and Israel. Consistent with theory and prior research, immigrants reported lower life satisfaction than natives on average, while the size of the life satisfaction gap varied substantially across individuals ...

Polluted Job Search: The Impact of Poor Air Quality on Reservation Wages

This paper investigates the impact of air pollution on reservation wages. We use rich survey data on unemployed job seekers in Germany and exploit variation in individual exposure to fine particulate matter (PM10) based on the quasi-random allocation of interview slots to individuals. Our results show that an increase in PM10 by one standard deviation (corresponding to 12 μg/m3) reduces the reservation ...

Understanding the public-private sector wage gap in Germany: New evidence from a Fixed Effects quantile Approach∗

The public-private sector wage gap is an important labor market indicator, reflecting sectoral differences in wage and recruitment policies. We provide new evidence on this sectoral gap throughout the wage distribution in Germany. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (1984–2017), we decompose the wage gap and control for unobservable factors that endogenously determine the occupational sector ...

Quantile regression estimands and models: revisiting the motherhood wage penalty debate

This paper discusses the crucial but sometimes neglected differences between unconditional quantile regression (UQR) models and quantile treatment effects (QTE) models. We argue that there is a frequent mismatch between the aim of the quantile regression analysis and the quantitative toolkit used in much of the applied literature, including the motherhood wage penalty literature. This mismatch may ...

Observability, Honesty, and the Social Image Costs of Lying

We study the role of social image in influencing lying behavior through a pre-registered within-subject experiment embedded in the 2020 wave of the German SocioEconomic Panel Innovation Sample (SOEP-IS). By exogenously manipulating the observability of lying across two tasks, we explore how individuals respond to increased image costs of lying. By exploiting the rich comprehensive socio-demographic ...