Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

The role of the career costs of children for the effect of public child care on fertility and maternal employment

This paper investigates whether the effects of affordable and easily available public child care on fertility and maternal employment depend on the career costs of children a woman faces. It builds on the idea that these costs vary by occupation and education. In a generalized Diff-in-Diff, I exploit the substantial variation between West German counties concerning intensity and speed of the provision ...

Some Contributions of Economics to the Study of Personality

This paper synthesizes recent research in economics and psychology on the measurement and empirical importance of personality skills and preferences. They predict and cause important life outcomes such as wages, health, and longevity. Skills develop over the life cycle and can be enhanced by education, parenting, and environmental influences to different degrees at different ages. Economic analysis ...

Suddenly a Stay-At-Home Dad? Short- and Long-term Consequences of Fathers’ Job Loss on Time Investment in the Household

Commonly described as the “gender care gap”, there is a persistent gender difference in the division of domestic responsibilities in most developed countries. We provide novel evidence on the short- and long-run effects of an exogenous shock on paternal availability, through a job loss, on the allocation of domestic work within couples. We find that paternal child care and housework significantly increase ...

Do Gender-role Values Matter? Explaining New Refugee Women’s Social Contact in Germany

This article investigates whether gender-role values are linked to refugee women’s social contact in Germany. By building on the “preferences–third parties–opportunities” framework, we explicate a direct and an indirect path through which gender-role values may be related to refugee women’s minority-majority, intra-minority, and inter-minority contact. By applying median regressions, marginal structural ...

Social Integration of Refugees Is Improving

Five years ago, almost a million people came to Germany seeking refuge. Chancellor Angela Merkel responded to public concern over such a large influx of refugees with her well-known saying, “Wir schaffen das” (We can do this!). Much has happened since then. As this report shows, the German population’s concerns over immigration have been decreasing since 2016. Nevertheless, refugees are increasingly ...

Higher Order Risk Preferences: New Experimental Measures, Determinants and Field Behavior

We use a novel method to elicit and measure higher order risk preferences (prudence and temperance) in an experiment with 658 adolescents. In line with theoretical predictions, we find that higher order risk preferences - particularly prudence - are strongly related to adolescents' field behavior, including their financial decision making, eco-friendly behavior, and health status, including addictive ...

Millionaires under the Microscope: Data Gap on Top Wealth Holders Closed; Wealth Concentration Higher than Presumed

Individuals with assets in the millions of euros have been underrepresented in population surveys and accordingly little has been known about them. As a result, the full extent of wealth concentration in Germany was unknown. To close the existing data gap, the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) inte- grated a special sample in which individuals with high assets are overrepresented. New calculations using ...

Education Differences in Women’s Body Weight Trajectories: The Role of Motherhood

Studies have found that education differences in women’s body weight increase until middle adulthood. The explanatory mechanisms behind this increase are not well-understood. This study examined the role of education differences in the prevalence of motherhood as a risk factor for weight gain and in vulnerability to its effects on weight gain. We used longitudinal data from the German Socio-economic ...

The Need for Household Panel Surveys in Times of Crisis: The Case of SOEP-CoV

The spread of the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, poses major challenges for individuals and societies at large. The question now is how individuals and society are dealing with these challenges, and what health, psychological, social, and economic effects they will have to bear. Meaningful answers can only be provided using a generalizable database that contains contextual information such as family ...

Family Life in Lockdown (Version: September 22, 2020)