Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Settlement intentions of Ukrainian refugees in Germany: Adhering to social status back home or restarting again abroad?

Background: The choice between permanent settlement and temporary migration has garnered increased attention in international migration studies, yet the decisions of refugees remain underexplored. Objective: Building on the existing literature on return migration among voluntary migrants, this paper investigates the importance of socio-psychological and economic-skills contexts in refugees’ home and ...

Child sick care-related absence from work and the consequences on parents' income

This study investigates the impact of child-related absence from work on the income of working mothers and fathers, addressing a significant research gap in sociology and labour economics. While previous research has established that gender and parenthood significantly influence income levels, the consequences of caring for a sick child-a common and unpredictable responsibility-remain inadequately ...

Impacts of Different Measures of Health on Labor Market Exit

Pandemic-Ready Data: Linking the Socio-Economic Panel with Administrative Health Records

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed significant weaknesses in Germany’s ability to generate timely, equity-sensitive evidence at the household level. While national surveillance systems produced daily counts of confirmed cases, hospitalisations, and deaths, they offered little insight into the social and economic conditions shaping the spread and impact of the virus. Non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), ...

Consolidated Trajectories? Social Class and Earnings Growth over the Life Course

What kind of earnings mobility regime defines our society? Are individuals’ earnings trajectories primarily shaped by their social class position, or do trajectories vary within them? These unresolved questions lie at the heart of debates on social class and labor market rewards. To address them, we leverage employment relations theory and data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. We use mixed effects ...

Immigrant labor market dynamics in Germany by family status

Background: The labor market activities of immigrants are diverse and highly gendered. Few studies have examined these disparities by legal entry pathway in a multi-state framework that accounts for multiple entries to and exits from the market. Objective: We analyze immigrants’ timing and level of participation in training and labor market activities by gender, parity, and legal entry pathway. Methods: ...

Beyond overall income inequality: Racial income gaps and health disparities

In this paper, we combine Census data with death records to examine the relationship between income inequality and race-specific mortality across 5,565 municipalities in Brazil. We find that overall income inequality is strongly associated with Non-White mortality but not with White mortality. To understand this disparity, we decompose the Gini coefficient and find that the racial income gap accounts ...

What happens to renters? Increased financing costs and government support

How does the recent hike in interest rates translate into housing markets and shape preferences for government intervention? Homeownership constitutes the most typical form of private wealth accumulation. Yet, with the decade long period of low interest rates ending in 2022, higher financing costs decreased the affordability of ownership substantially. This paper analyzes implications for the political ...

Additive Density Regression

We present a structured additive regression approach to model conditional densities given scalar covariates, where only samples of the conditional distributions are observed. This links our approach to distributional regression models for scalar data. The model is formulated in a Bayes Hilbert space -- preserving nonnegativity and integration to one under summation and scalar multiplication -- with ...

Benefits and Employees’ Work Effort: An Empirical Analysis of Non-monetary Incentives

Despite extensive literature on incentives to increase employees’ work performance, economic research on employer-provided non-monetary benefits remains rare. This study investigates the relationship between benefits and employees’ work effort utilizing data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. The analysis is based on data from eleven survey waves from 2006 to 2022 and considers five benefit types: ...