Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

How higher-order personal values affect the purchase of electricity storage—Evidence from the German photovoltaic market

Why do consumers make different decisions even when socioeconomic conditions are similar? The present article examines the effects of human values—as formulations of motivational goals—on the decision to purchase electricity storage for a photovoltaic system, a phenomenon hardly explored in prior research regarding high-priced household investments. About 50 percent of photovoltaic-system owners in ...

30 Years of East-West Migration in Germany: A Synthesis of the Literature and Potential Directions for Future Research

The reunification of the socialist German Democratic Republic and the capitalist Federal Republic of Germany presents a unique setting for studying the impact of socio-economic and political change on migration. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the interdisciplinary literature on migration between East and West Germany since reunification, conducted in disciplines such as economics, demography, ...

Care and Careers: Gender Differences in the Reconciliation of Work and Family

Die Vereinbarkeit von Beruf und Familie ist eine der größten Herausforderungen und gleichzeitig Gelingensbedingung für Geschlechtergerechtigkeit auf dem Arbeitsmarkt und im familiären Bereich. Die vorliegende Dissertation verdeutlicht in drei empirischen Papieren die Relevanz von Sorgearbeit für die Arbeitsmarktpartizipation von Frauen und Männern, sowie die Rolle von Unternehmen für das Unterfangen, ...

The impact of natives’ attitudes on refugee integration

Exploiting the random allocation of asylum seekers to different locations in Germany, we study the impact of right-wing voting on refugees’ integration. We find that in municipalities with more voting for the right-wing AfD, refugees have worse economic and social integration. These impacts are largest for groups targeted by AfD campaigns and refugees are also more likely to suffer from harassment and ...

The Labour Supply of Mothers

This chapter surveys recent literature on the drivers of mothers’ labour supply in OECD countries. We present a number of facts on the variations across time and across countries of family composition and mothers’ employment. We aim to answer key questions on their decision to return to work after childbirth: How is the decision taken within the household? What are the contemporaneous and longer term ...

Social Inequalities―Empirical Focus

Social inequalities constitute one of the largest research fields of sociology in the German-speaking countries. This field has been successfully institutionalized and internationalized in recent decades. Today, it rests on a rich data infrastructure and a large body of cumulative research. The article traces this advancement in terms of shifting theoretical paradigms, methodological innovations, and ...

Germany’s low SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence confirms effective containment in 2020: Results of the nationwide RKI-SOEP study

Pre-vaccine SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence data from Germany are scarce outside hotspots, and socioeconomic disparities remained largely unexplored. The nationwide RKI-SOEP study with 15,122 adult participants investigated seroprevalence and testing in a supplementary wave of the Socio-Economic-Panel conducted predominantly in October-November 2020. Self-collected oral-nasal swabs were PCR-positive in 0.4% ...

Statutory Pension Insurance Accounts and Divorce: A New Scientific Use File

Parental Separation and the Formation of Economic Preferences

We estimate the effect of parental separation on the risk and trust attitudes of German adolescents using a large household survey dataset, which allows us to match respondents to their siblings and parents. Our results indicate that adolescents from separated families are less trusting but have the same risk tolerance as adolescents from non-separated families, even after conditioning on the attitudes ...

Can Schools Change Religious Attitudes? Evidence from German State Reforms of Compulsory Religious Education

We study whether compulsory religious education in schools affects students' religiosity as adults. We exploit the staggered termination of compulsory religious education across German states in models with state and cohort fixed effects. Using three different datasets, we find that abolishing compulsory religious education significantly reduced religiosity of affected students in adulthood. It ...