Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Financial Risk Tolerance: Where Does It All Start From?

This chapter introduces the relevance of the debate on financial risk tolerance starting from reconstructing the key macroeconomic changes that progressively expanded the investor base in Europe and beyond starting in the 1990s, focusing both on financial markets and on other relevant sectors. The increased investment opportunities available to the retail investor expanded potential opportunities for ...

Risk Tolerance Tools: From Academia to Regulation and Back

This chapter takes a closer look at the implementation of the first compliance tool to measure risk tolerance in the European Union—the MiFID suitability questionnaire. The literature review carried out in Chapter 1has clearly identified the key dimensions of variability that characterized the academic notion of risk tolerance up to the introduction of the suitability questionnaire. This chapter sets ...

Essays on Expectations and Welfare Analysis of Bargaining Models, and Social Network

Parental Networks, Wage Expectations, and the Intergenerational Educational Mobility

We develop a theoretical labour market model with two generations of workers, endogenous social networks of parents and binary schooling choices of children. Since the market skill premium is unobservable, families rely on noisy wage information obtained from their social contacts giving rise to heterogeneous expectations across families. If social networks are subject to skill homophily and high skill ...

Economic Preferences and the Self-selection of Immigrants

Classical theories hypothesize individual economic preferences, including preferences toward risk, time, and trust, as determinants for migration intention. In the paper, we combine data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, European Social Survey, and World Values Survey to investigate how immigrants to Germany are self-selected from the origin population based on their preferences. We find a higher ...

Non-Cognitive Skills and Labour Market Performance of Immigrants

This paper investigates how non-cognitive skills, e.g., memory, empathy, attention, imagination, and social skills – measured by personality characteristics – relate to the relative labour market performance of immigrants. Using the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and the Five-Factor Model of personality as a proxy for the non-cognitive skills, we show that these skills matter for the labour market ...

World War II Blues: The Long–lasting Mental Health Effect of Childhood Trauma

There has been a revival of warfare and threats of interstate war in recent years as the number of countries engaged in armed conflict surged dramatically, reaching to levels unprecedented since the end of Cold War. This is happening at a time when the global burden of mental health illness is also on the rise. We examine the causal impact of early life exposure to warfare on long–term mental health, ...

Income Misperception and Populism

We propose that false beliefs about the own current economic status are an important factor for explaining populist attitudes. Along with the subjects' receptiveness to right-wing populism, we elicit their perceived relative income positions in a representative survey of German households. We find that people with pessimistic beliefs about their income position are more attuned to populist statements. ...

Under contract and in good health: a multigroup cross-lagged panel model of time use and health-related quality of life in working-age men and women

Background: Self-reported time-use in relation to health-related quality of life (HRQoL) has been widely studied, yet less is known about the directionality of the association and how it compares across genders when controlling for sociodemographic confounders. Methods: This study focused on the working population of the most recent waves (2013–2018) of the Core-Study of the German Socio-Economic Panel ...

Locus of Control and Prosocial Behavior

We investigate how locus of control beliefs – the extent to which individuals attribute control over events in their life to themselves as opposed to outside factors – affect prosocial behavior and the private provision of public goods. We begin by developing a conceptual framework showing how locus of control beliefs serve as a weight placed on the returns from one’s own contributions (impure altruism) ...