Leibniz ScienceCampus
Berlin Centre for Consumer Policies (BCCP) Research Day

At this BCCP Research Day (formerly known as BCCP Forum), Fellows will give short pitches of their current research. Since we also want to have enough time for discussions and networking, we plan long coffee breaks between the presentation sessions as well as get-together afterwards.

The event will bring together all BCCP fellows in law and economics who are engaged in the activities of the science campus. We will have the opportunity to learn about each other’s research during short presentations by the different partner institutions followed by open discussion. The objective of the meeting is to encourage discourse and exchange and clarify the themes and aims of BCCP.

Research on parental school choice provides strong evidence of so-called ‘white flight’ – that ethnic majority parents avoid choosing a local school if it contains large numbers of ethnic minority students. In this study, we examine such segregating choices in a formally stratified school system. Theoretically, we argue that segregating choices are less common in an educational setting where parents face stricter tracking policies. To test this argument empirically, we consider the case of German secondary schools where locally varying degrees of ability tracking coincide with a geographically unrestricted choice of secondary schools. Based on a combination of survey data from the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Survey in Four European Countries and administrative data on the location and composition of all secondary schools in Germany, we find evidence of segregating choices among ethnic majority families in German secondary schools. Moreover, these tendencies are more pronounced in regions with less rigorous tracking systems. These findings have important policy implications, as they suggest that institutional reforms striving for greater integration may be partially offset by more segregating parental school choice. More generally, our study contributes to a better understanding of the ways in which an interplay between formal rules and discriminatory school choices often leads to persistent patterns of ethnic segregation in schools.

The German Socio-Economic Panel Study is a representative panel study for the German population, collecting data on a broad variety of topics of everyday life, including general wellbeing, household composition, educational aspirations and educational status, income and occupational biographies, leisure time activities, housing, health, political orientation and more. With its long running panel structure, the breadth of topics and the representative nature of the data, the SOEP has become a central resources for quantitative research in the social sciences in Germany.

Joint Spring Meeting of BBSR, BTU & SOEP RegioHub

Linking survey data with spatial data is an emerging topic in the social sciences, providing the possibility to contextualize sociodemographic information and social attitudes with geospatial data such as regional indicators, neighborhood information, or environmental time series. The provision of health care, education, housing markets, or transportation infrastructures is spatially dependent and leads to unequal living conditions between urban and rural spaces, Eastern and Western Germany, or between central hubs and left-behind places. Geodata allows for assessing the impact of different spatial opportunity structures on attitudes, preferences, and behaviors. Examples of such research are the proximity effect of refugee accommodation on anti-immigrant attitudes (Schmidt et al. 2023), day-to-day activities in labor market contexts (IAB-SMART), or satisfaction with local pandemic management during the COVID-19 crisis (Jaschke et al. 2023).

Over the past few years, an increasing amount of georeferenced survey data has become available, enabling researchers to investigate the interdependence of individual, household, and spatial factors. In Germany, major surveys like the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), the Panel Study Labour Market and Social Security (PASS), or the GESIS Panel have started enriching their existing data with regional indicators and other spatial information. At the same time, linking spatial and survey data remains challenging as it requires advanced technical and analytical skills.

The 15th International German Socio-Economic Panel User Conference (SOEP2024) will be held in Berlin from July 4 to July 5, 2024 at DIW Berlin.

The conference provides researchers who use the SOEP (including the SOEP part of the Cross-National Equivalent File (CNEF) and LIS/LWS data) with the opportunity to present and discuss their work with their peers. Researchers of all disciplines (e.g., economics, demography, geography, political science, public health, psychology, and sociology) are invited to submit an abstract.

The theme of the conference and keynote speeches will be "the individual and collective responses to a changing world". We particularly welcome contributions examining the above topic. In addition, we encourage submissions beyond this thematic focus, particularly submissions using the longitudinal features of SOEP and papers on survey methodology and cross-national comparative analysis.