Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Successfully Striving for Happiness: Socially Engaged Pursuits Predict Increases in Life Satisfaction

Happiness is considered a highly desirable attribute, but whether or not individuals can actively steer their lives toward greater well-being is an open empirical question. In this study, respondents from a representative German sample reported, in text format, ideas for how they could improve their life satisfaction. We investigated which of these ideas predicted changes in life satisfaction 1 year ...

RZOO: Efficient Storage and Retrieval of Social Science Data

Changes in Job Stability: Evidence from Lifetime Job Histories

We use lifetime job histories from the pension records to evaluate changes in job stability in Finland between 1963 and 2004. We specify a duration model and estimate the effects of elapsed duration, age, and calendar time on the hazard of job ending using individual-level panel data spanning over four decades. We find that this hazard increased during the recession years in the early 1990s but has ...

Dependent Self-Employment as a Way to Evade Employment Protection Legislation

This paper examines whether the strictness of employment protection legislation encourages employers to contract out work to their own paid employees by the formula of dependent self-employment, while making transitions to independent selfemployment less likely by altering the relative valuation of risk between salaried work and selfemployment in favour of the former. In conducting this analysis, discrete ...

Unemployment and Health: An Analysis by Means of Better Data and Improved Methodology (Dissertation)

Effects of short- and long-term unemployment on health satisfaction: evidence from German data

Why Are Women Delaying Motherhood in Germany?

German fertility trends show that the average age at which women have their first child has increased in recent decades. Moreover, researchers have argued that delayed maternity is an important factor in reduced fertility. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), this paper contributes to the debate about maternity timing and reduced fertility in Germany by analyzing some of the factors ...

Do older workers earn more than they deserve?

SOEP as a Source for Research on Ageing - Issues, Measures and Possibilities for Improvement

Skill demand and the comparative advantage of age: Jobs tasks and earnings from the 1980s to the 2000s in Germany

We study the impact of rapid technological change on age and cohort variation in type of work and wages among German men for the 1986–2006 period. Using a task-based approach, we analyze the consequences that technological progress had on changes in the distribution of tasks performed by the men and the relative wages they received. Technological changes implied fewer physically demanding job tasks ...