Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

The impact of economic uncertainty, precarious employment, and risk attitudes on the transition to parenthood

This study investigates how precarious employment throughout the life course affects the fertility behavior of men and women in Germany, and how risk attitudes moderate exposure to objectively given uncertainty. Analyzing data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study from 1990 to 2015, I find that men and women have become quite similar in their fertility behavior: Stable employment accelerates ...

Child care, social norms and women's labor supply: Four empirical essays in family economics

Diese Dissertation umfasst vier eigenständige Kapitel, die jeweils einen eigenen Beitrag zur ökonomischen Literatur der frühkindlichen Bildung und Betreuung, sozialer Normen und Erwerbsentscheidungen von Frauen leisten. Soziale Normen gelten als zentrale Erklärung für die sich ändernde Erwerbsbeteiligung von Frauen. Kapitel 2 dieser Dissertation untersucht die intergenerationale Transmission dieser ...

Mind the “Happiness” Gap: The Relationship Between Cohabitation, Marriage, and Subjective Well-being in the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, and Norway

Many studies have found that married people have higher subjective well-being than those who are not married. Yet the increase in cohabitation raises questions as to whether only marriage has beneficial effects. In this study, we examine differences in subjective well-being between cohabiting and married men and women in midlife, comparing the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, and Norway. We apply ...

Do vegetarians feel bad? Examining the association between eating vegetarian and subjective well-being in two representative samples

Research on the relationship between vegetarianism and subjective well-being (SWB) has produced inconsistent results, which may partly be due to small sample sizes and divergent operationalizations of well-being. For these reasons, the present study aimed to thoroughly examine this association in two large representative samples from Germany (Study 1: N = 12,905, including 665 vegetarians) and Australia ...

Does Starting Universal Childcare Earlier Influence Children’s Skill Development?

As many developed countries enact policies that allow children to begin universal childcare earlier, understanding how starting universal childcare earlier affects children’s cognitive and noncognitive skills is an important policy question. We provide comprehensive evidence on the multidimensional short- and longer-run effects of starting universal childcare earlier using a fuzzy discontinuity in ...

Using Facebook and Instagram to Recruit Web Survey Participants: A Step-by-Step Guide and Application

In many countries and contexts, survey researchers are facing decreasing response rates and increasing survey costs. Data collection is even more complex and expensive when rare or hard-to-reach populations are to be sampled and surveyed. In such cases alternative sampling and recruiting approaches are usually needed, including non-probability and online convenience sampling. A rather novel approach ...

Desperate Housewives and Happy Working Mothers: Are Parent-Couples with Equal Income More Satisfied throughout Parenthood? A Dyadic Longitudinal Study

Are parent-couples with equal income more satisfied as their children grow up, than those who prioritize the father’s career (specialize)? For the first time, 384 German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study couples were categorized into life-course coupled earnings types, by tracing how earnings were divided within couples between the ages of 1 to 15 of their youngest child. Multivariate, multilevel analysis ...

‘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)