Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

The Transition in East Germany: When is a Ten Point Fall in the Gender Wage Gap Bad News?

The gender wage gap in East Germany has narrowed by 10 percentage points in transition, but women have experienced much more severe employment difficulties than men. Using the German Socio-Economic Panel for 1990–94, I show that on balance women have lost relative to men. Almost half the relative wage gain is due to exits from employment of the low skilled, who are disproportionately women. The female ...

Are Migrants More Skilled than Non-Migrants? Repeat, return, and same-employer migrants

Convergence and determinants of non-employment durations in Eastern and Western Germany

Staunching emigration from East Germany: Age and the determinants of migration

Flexible Work Time in Germany: Do Workers Like It and How Have Employers Exploited It Over the Cycle?

After describing qualitatively the increasingly flexible organization of work hours in Germany, I turn to the German Socio-Economic Panel to quantify practices and trends, and assess their effects on workers and employers. Measuring flexibility as the extent to which overtime is compensated with time off, and hence receives no overtime premium, I show that hourly-paid workers have undergone a regime ...

From Reunification to Economic Integration: Productivity and the Labor Market in East Germany

Naming Differences in Divided Germany

This article analyzes differences in naming between East and West Germany. After World War II, Germany was split by the allied forces. Two Germanies emerged: the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The country’s division lasted about forty years (1949–1989), a time span in which vastly different geo-political frameworks — Eastern bloc versus Western bloc — shaped ...

Statistical Problems and Solutions in Onomastic Research – Exemplified by a Comparison of Given Name Distributions in Germany throughout the 20th Century

The German Socio Economic Panel Study (SOEP) offers the rare opportunity to look at patterns of given names amongst a representative sample of more than 50,000 people born since 1900. This article develops an exemplary picture of typical frequency distributions for given names and their developments over time. In this paper, we first discuss the advantages and limitations of various data bases which ...

Reciprocal Associations between Parenting Challenges and Parents’ Personality Development in Young and Middle Adulthood

Having children affects many aspects of people’s lives. However, it remains unclear to what degree the challenges that come along with having children are associated with parents’ personality development. We addressed this question in two studies by investigating the relationship between parenting challenges and personality development in mothers of newborns (Study 1, N = 556) and the reciprocal associations ...

Developmental Tasks as a Framework to Study Personality Development in Adulthood and Old Age

Research consistently shows that personality development is a lifelong phenomenon, with mean-level and rank-order changes occurring in all life phases. What happens during specific life phases that can explain these developmental patterns? In the present paper, we review literature linking personality development in different phases of adulthood to developmental tasks associated with these phases. ...