Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Prediction Based on Entrepreneurship-Prone Personality Profiles: Sometimes Worse Than the Toss of a Coin

The human personality predicts a wide range of activities and occupational choices—from musical sophistication to entrepreneurial careers. However, which method should be applied if information on personality traits is used for prediction and advice? In psychological research, group profiles are widely employed. In this contribution, we examine the performance of profiles using the example of career ...

Long-Run Consequences of Informal Elderly Care and Implications of Public Long-Term Care Insurance

In this paper, I estimate a dynamic structural model of labor supply, retirement, and informal care supply, incorporating labor market frictions and the German tax and benefit system. I find that informal elderly care has adverse and persistent effects on labor market outcomes and therefore negatively affects lifetime earnings, future pension benefits, and individuals’ well-being. These consequences ...

A Large Scale Test of the Effect of Social Class on Prosocial Behavior

Does being from a higher social class lead a person to engage in more or less prosocial behavior? Psychological research has recently provided support for a negative effect of social class on prosocial behavior. However, research outside the field of psychology has mainly found evidence for positive or u-shaped relations. In the present research, we therefore thoroughly examined the effect of social ...

Measuring and explaining tax evasion: Improving self-reports using the crosswise model

Due to its sensitive nature, tax compliance is difficult to study empirically, and valid information on tax evasion is rare. More specifically, when directly asked on surveys, respondents are likely to underreport their evasion behavior. Such invalid responses not only bias prevalence estimates but may also obscure associations with individual predictors. To generate more valid estimates of tax evasion, ...

Women’s Opportunities Under Different Constellations of Family Policies in Western Countries: A Comparative Analysis

Women’s rising labor force participation since the 1960’s was long seen as heralding decreasing gender inequalities. According to influential social science writings this view has now to be revised; “women friendly” policies bringing women into the workforce are held to create major inequality tradeoffs between quantity and quality in women’s jobs. Unintendedly, such policies increase employer statistical ...

Causes and Trends of the Digital Divide

The Formation of Prosociality: Causal Evidence on the Role of Social Environment

This study presents descriptive and causal evidence on the role of social environment for the formation of prosociality. In a first step, we show that socio-economic status (SES) as well as the intensity of mother-child interaction and mothers’ prosocial attitudes are systematically related to elementary school children’s prosociality. In a second step, we present evidence on a randomly assigned variation ...

Impatience among Preschool Children and their Mothers

Using experimental data of children and their mothers, this paper explores the intergenerational relationship of impatience. The child’s impatience stems from a delay of gratification experiment. Mother’s impatience has been assessed by a choice task where the mothers faced trade-offs between a smaller-sooner and a larger-later monetary reward with a delay of six or twelve months. The findings demonstrate ...

Quasi-Hyperbolic Time Preferences and their Intergenerational Transmission

This study explores the intergenerational transmission of time preferences and focuses on the question which specific aspects of mother's time preference are related to her preschool child's ability to delay gratification. We provide a new procedure for assessing the parameters of a "quasi-hyperbolic" discount function (Laibson, 1997) using two trade-off experiments. We apply the ...

Effectiveness of Social Capital in the Job Search Process

The empirical literature has provided ample yet contradictory evidence on the effectiveness of social ties in the job search process in terms of post-hire outcomes, such as wages or job satisfaction. Whereas early research, mainly focussing on the U.S. labour market, found positive correlations between finding a job via social ties and post-hire outcomes, most recent studies reported inconclusive or ...