Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Social isolation as a consequence of transitions in partner relationships: How formations and endings of partner relationships affect the risk of social disconnectedness

Objective: The study examines whether the risk of social isolation is affected by a union formation, marriage and by relationship endings. Background: Social isolation is a broadly discussed social problem but little is known about how social isolation emerges. As regards the role of partner relationships, previous research has yielded mixed results on whether there are isolating effects of marriage, ...

German Migration and Remigration Panel Study (GERPS): Methodology and Data Manual of the Baseline Survey (Wave 1)

International migration between economically highly developed countries is a central component of global migration flows. Still, surprisingly little is known about the international mobility of the populations of these affluent societies. The aim of the German Emigration and Remigration Panel Study (GERPS) is to collect data to analyse the individual consequences of international migration as well ...

The Evolution of Inequality of Opportunity in Germany: A Machine Learning Approach

We show that measures of inequality of opportunity (IOP) fully consistent with the IOP theory of Roemer (1998) can be straightforwardly estimated by adopting a machine learning approach, and apply our method to analyze the development of IOP in Germany during the past three decades. Hereby, we take advantage of information contained in 25 waves of the Socio‐Economic Panel. Our analysis shows that in ...

The German Minimum Wage and Wage Growth: Heterogeneous Treatment Effects Using Causal Forests

Previous research suggests that minimum wages induce heterogeneous treatment effects on wages across different groups of employees. This research usually defines groups ex ante. We analyze to what extent effect heterogeneities can be discerned in a data-driven manner by adapting the generalized random forest implementation of Athey et al (2019) in a difference-in-differences setting. Such a data-driven ...

‘Grey zones’ within dependent employment: formal and informal forms of on-call work in Germany

This article aims to take stock of the various manifestations of on-call work in Germany. It is shown that formal on-call work is, by international standards, relatively strictly regulated in Germany, not least as the result of a 2019 reform of the law. Similar to other countries, however, other informal variants are used that lie outside the scope of the re-regulation or ‘normalisation’ of formal ...

How Threatening Are Transformations of Happiness Scales to Subjective Wellbeing Research?

Two recent papers argue that many results based on ordinal reports of happiness can be reversed with suitable monotonic increasing transformations of the associated happiness scale (Bond and Lang 2019; Schröder and Yitzhaki 2017). If true, empirical research utilizing such reports is in trouble. Against this background, we make four main contributions. First, we show that reversals are fundamentally ...

Valuing energy infrastructure externalities using wellbeing and hedonic price data: the case of wind turbines (Ch. 16)

Self-selection of Asylum Seekers: Evidence From Germany

I examine the pattern of selection on education of asylum seekers recently arrived in Germany from five key source countries: Afghanistan, Albania, Iraq, Serbia, and Syria. The analysis relies on original individual-level data collected in Germany combined with surveys conducted at origin. The results reveal a positive pattern of selection on education for asylum seekers who were able to flee Iraq ...

Age-related differences in actual-ideal personality trait level discrepancies

People differ from each other in their typical patterns of behavior, thought, and emotion and these patterns are considered to constitute their personalities (Funder, 2001). For various reasons, for example, because certain trait levels may help to attain certain goals or fulfill certain social roles, people may experience that their actual trait levels are different from their ideal trait levels. ...

The German Job Search Panel

This report introduces the German Job Search Panel, a longitudinal survey that follows people who register as job seeking over the course of up to two years. The focus of the survey is on job seekers’ well-being and health. An innovative survey app is used to allow for frequent measurement every month and for conducting the experience sampling method. The collected data may be linked to administrative ...