Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Social Origins of German Emigrants: Maintaining Social Status Through International Mobility? (Chapter 8)

The prospect of upward social mobility is a central motive for international migration. Curiously, the nexus of spatial and social mobility attracted attention only relatively late and existing research on intergenerational social mobility usually concentrates on the constellation within the nation state. This chapter expands on this literature by investigating the intergenerational social mobility ...

The creation and resolution of discrepancies between preferred and actual working hours over the life course

This article contributes to the analysis of working hour discrepancies, i.e., under- and overemployment, by exploring how they emerge and resolve with special consideration of the household context. It uses a rich longitudinal data set, the German Socio-economic Panel, for a discrete duration analysis controlling for unobserved heterogeneity. We focus on the most relevant household and job characteristics. ...

The Global Lives of German Migrants: Consequences of International Migration Across the Life Course

Surveying Across Borders: The Experiences of the German Emigration and Remigration Panel Study (Chapter 2)

International migration is often characterised as a process of immigration from economically less developed to highly developed countries. Whereas the factors driving those flows and the integration of the respective ethnic groups are widely analysed, the international mobility of the populations of precisely those affluent societies is regularly missed and less-frequently studied. The chapter describes ...

Structures of German Emigration and Remigration: Historical Developments and Demographic Patterns (Chapter 3)

Germany today is one of the world’s most important countries of immigration but at the same time a country of emigration. During the last three decades, more than 3.3 million German citizens have left the country whereas 2.5 million have returned. Overall, 3.8 million Germans live outside Germany in another country of the OECD. The chapter analyses basic structures of German emigration and remigration. ...

Settlement or Return? The Intended Permanence of Emigration from Germany Across the Life Course (Chapter 6)

Economic approaches and socio-cultural integration are still the most prominent frameworks applied to explain return migration and permanent settlement. In contrast to the bulk of literature focusing on established migrations from poorer to richer regions, the contribution analyses the permanence of emigration from economically highly developed countries. Based on a life-course approach, it highlights ...

Brain Drain or Brain Circulation? Economic and Non-Economic Factors Driving the International Migration of German Citizens (Chapter 4)

International movements by people from economically highly developed welfare states are a puzzle for the classic canon of migration theories, which generally focus on flows from less to more developed regions. Based on a simple theoretical framework linking largely disparate literatures on international and internal migration as well as the field of global work experience, this chapter provides an ...

Emigrants’ missing votes

Emigrants are less likely to participate in elections in their home country. They are also self-selected in terms of education, gender, age, and political preferences, changing the structure of the origin population. High emigration rates can therefore have a systematic influence on election results. Using administrative migration and voting data, we show that counties in Poland that have experienced ...

The Happy Migrant? Emigration and its Impact on Subjective Well-Being (Chapter 11)

The chapter asks about possible causal effects of migration on subjective well-being (SWB) measured by self-reported overall life satisfaction. By combining the emigration sample of the German Emigration and Remigration Panel Study (GERPS) with a quasi-counterfactual sample of internationally non-mobile Germans provided by the Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) the difference-in-difference analyses ...

Age Differences in Deliberate Ignorance

People sometimes choose to remain ignorant, even when information comes at low marginal costs and promises high utility. To investigate whether older adults enlist deliberate ignorance more than younger adults, potentially as an emotion-regulation tool, we presented a representative sample of 1,910 residents of Germany with 13 scenarios in which knowledge could result in substantial gains or losses. ...