SOEP Research: Dynamics of Well-Being and Health

The Rise in Absenteeism in 2022 Is Only Partly Due to Electronic Sick Notes

In Germany, employee absences due to illness rose sharply, particularly in 2022. Various sources argue that the introduction of the electronic certificate of incapacity for work (eAU) caused this. Official data previously did not include absences that were not reported to health insurance providers; since the introduction of the eAU, this is no longer the case. This gap does not exist in Socio-Economic ...

Quantifying the Knobe Effect: Population-level Patterns and Heterogeneity Analyses

An influential survey by Joshua Knobe (2003) indicates that the cognitive process ascribing intentionality to an agent is mediated by the perceived moral worth of the action. To assess the external validity of the finding and to obtain more precise estimates of effect sizes, the present study replicates this canonical experiment with a large scale random sample of the German population (N = 2,295). ...

Diffusion of Cumulative Advantage? How Wealth and Health Trajectories Co-Evolve Across the Life Course among Older Adults

Objectives Cumulative advantage is a central concept in life course research. Prior research has primarily focused on one outcome domain, overlooking the possibility that cumulative advantage could extend into other domains–what we refer to as diffusion of cumulative advantage. We build on and extend cumulative inequality theory to conceptualize diffusion and apply it to wealth and health, two domains ...

Stress and Resilience in the Labor Market

The biological trace of public health policies: how Medicaid improved epigenetic aging in adolescence

Public health insurance for U.S. children has expanded dramatically through Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), yet the biological mechanisms linking these policies to long-run health remain poorly understood. We test whether childhood eligibility for Medicaid/CHIP causally affects epigenetic aging measures. Using longitudinal epigenetic data from the Fragile Families and...

The Unequal Distribution of Bitterness: Tracing Ressentiment in Times of Change

Modern democracies are undergoing multiple, overlapping transformations, driven by globalization, digitalization, migration, inequality, and climate change. While some adapt with openness, others experience what Mau et al. (2023) term Veränderungserschöpfung – change fatigue: the sense that “too much is changing, too fast, and all at once.” This paper examines whether and how such fatigue...

How a Mismatch Between Actual and Desired Fertility Relates to Well-Being Across Adulthood

Introduction Most people want two or more children, but many do not realize their fertility desires. At the same time, recent studies suggest that up to 15% of parents regret having children. To investigate how fertility mismatch relates to well-being (i.e., affect balance, life satisfaction, family life satisfaction, and work satisfaction), this preregistered study used nationally representative cross-sectional ...

Labor Market Entry Dynamics and Mental Health Outcomes among Young People with and without Disability

Young people with disability face significant barriers to stable employment. Yet, little is known about how early labor market experiences shape their long-term mental health. This study examines associations between early career insecurity and subsequent mental health trajectories, focusing on disability status as a key axis of inequality. We use nationally representative longitudinal data from the ...

Dynamic Networks of Social Contact, Social Desire, and Affect Across Time Scales

Social relationships are central to well-being because they fulfill social affiliation needs. To explain how social needs are regulated, theories describe daily-life processes among social desire, social contact, and affect. Still, these processes remain empirically underexplored because of their complexity. In this study, we estimated multivariate associations of social desire and affect with social ...

Toward an Integrated Crisis Data Infrastructure in Germany: Linking the Socio-Economic Panel with Administrative Health Records

This paper examines the gaps in Germany’s data infrastructure for responding to crises, as revealed during COVID-19, and argues that linking the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) with administrative health records would strengthen the country’s ability to generate equity-sensitive evidence during future health-related crises. Drawing on evidence from the RKI-SOEP study, we illustrate the added value of combining ...