SOEP-Suche

Individual Poverty Paths and the Stability of Control-Perception

This paper investigates whether individual control-perception affects the probability of becoming poor, and vice versa, whether poverty experiences can be detrimental to these traits later on. The former relation is intuitive as control related traits underlay many idiosyncratic determinants of poverty. Though traits like control-perception are known to stabilize towards adulthood, the latter association ...

Illness and Health Satisfaction: The Role of Relative Comparisons

This paper investigates the role of relative comparisons in health status for individual health satisfaction. Previous research stresses the importance of interdependencies in subjective well-being and health arising from positional preferences and status effects, social health norms, and comparison processes. Using representative longitudinal data from a German population survey, we estimate empirical ...

Leave the Drama on the Stage: The Effect of Cultural Participation on Health

The aim of this study is to estimate the causal effect of cultural participation on health status. Cultural activities may directly impact upon health through palliative coping or substituting health-compromising behaviors. Cultural engagement may also facilitate the development of social networks, which can improve health via social support and the dissemination of social health norms. Previous estimates ...

Caring Alone? Social Capital and the Mental Health of Caregivers

This study analyzes the role of social capital in buffering the negative relationship between informal-care provision and mental health. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and fixed-effect regression models, we show that those individuals who socialize more frequently enjoy better mental health. We also find that stronger social ties moderate the negative association between caregiving ...

The Social Context of Health (Dissertation)

This thesis presents three empirical essays on the wider social determinants of health status. It analyzes the relevance of cultural, social and psychological determinants of health and their implications for health policy in Germany. These factors reflect the dependence of health status and subjective health assessment on the individual’s social environment. The empirical analyses rely on large-scale ...

A life-span perspective on life satisfaction

The German population is ageing due to decreasing birth rates and increasing life expectancy. To sustain the German pension system, legal retirement age is increased step by step to 67 years. This raises questions about how to enable and motivate older individuals to work that long. Hence, it is important to understand whether they represent a homogeneous group that can be addressed through specific ...

Inheritance and Gifts in Germany

Subsidising Social Insurance Contributions in the Low-wage Sector: Lacking in Precision and too Expensive

The risk of becoming unemployed is particularly high for the low-skilled. Moreover, the chances of an unskilled unemployed person re-entering employment is also significantly lower. As a rule low skills mean low productivity, which evidently means that it is often not worthwhile for firms to employ them at the given wage level, particularly in phases of rapid structural change. In order to improve ...

The German Socio-Economic Panel: a Database for Longitudinal International Comparisons

Stability of Risk Attitudes and Media Coverage of Economic News

This paper investigates the impact of exogenous changes in individuals' perceived economic environment on their self-stated risk attitudes by exploiting changes in media coverage of economic news. We use information on risk attitudes from the German Socioeconomic Panel and combine it with data on the average daily frequency of economic news reports during the year and the month preceding the date ...