Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

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 ...

Genderdifferenzen bei Rentenübergängen: Erklären Persönlichkeitsmerkmale die Unterschiede?

Dieser Beitrag untersucht geschlechterspezifische Unterschiede im Rentenübergang anhand von Persönlichkeitsmerkmalen in Deutschland. Im Mittelpunkt steht dabei die Stimulierung von bestimmten Einstellungen durch die Einführung der Mütterrente in den Jahren 2014 und 2019. Unter Anwendung des SOEP v.34 (2017) wurde die Zusammenhangsstruktur von Renteneintrittsalter und den Big Five untersucht, während ...

How Family Transfers Crowd-out Social Assistance in Germany

The non-take-up of social assistance has been receiving increased attention among policy makers in recent years as it would apparently underpin the effectiveness of public intervention in alleviating poverty. We examine whether receipt of private transfers affects the household decision to take-up social assistance in Germany between 2009 and 2011. We exploit the follow-up of households in the SOEP ...

The Deep Imprint of Roman Sandals: Evidence of Long-lasting Effects of Roman Rule on Personality, Economic Performance, and Well-Being in Germany

We investigate whether the Roman presence in the southern part of Germany nearly 2,000 years ago had a deep imprinting effect with long run consequences on a broad spectrum of measures ranging from present-day personality profiles to a number of socioeconomic outcomes and why. Today’s populations living in the former Roman part of Germany score indeed higher on certain personality traits, have higher ...

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 ...