Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

The Effect of Disability Onset Across the Adult Life Span

To examine whether disability has an age-differential effect on life satisfaction across the adult life span and factors that promote maintenance of life satisfaction.We applied multilevel models to 4,372 (Mage = 60, SD = 14; 47% women) individuals from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study who experienced disability over the course of the study.Disability resulted in substantial and sustained declines ...

Changes in life satisfaction when losing one's spouse: individual differences in anticipation, reaction, adaptation and longevity in the German Socio-economic Panel Study (SOEP)

Losing a spouse is among the most devastating events that may occur in people's lives. We use longitudinal data from 1,224 participants in the German Socio-economic Panel Study (SOEP) to examine (a) how life satisfaction changes with the experience of spousal loss; (b) whether socio-demographic factors and social and health resources moderate spousal loss-related changes in life satisfaction; ...

The Immigrant-Native Wage Gap in Germany Revisited

This study provides new evidence on the levels of economic integration experienced by foreigners and naturalised immigrants relative to native Germans from 1994 to 2015. We decompose the wage gap using the method for unconditional quantile regression models by employing a regression of the (recentered) influence function (RIF) of the gross hourly wage on a rich set of explanatory variables. This approach ...

Parental Leave Policies and Socio-Economic Gaps in Child Development: Evidence from a Substantial Benefit Reform Using Administrative Data

This paper examines the effects of substantial changes in paid parental leave on child development and socio-economic development gaps. We exploit a German reform from 2007 that both expanded paid leave in the first year and removed paid leave in the second year following childbirth. Higher-income households benefited relatively more from the reform than low-income households. We use administrative ...

Moving up a Gear: The Impact of Compressing Instructional Time into Fewer Years of Schooling

Policy-makers face a trade-off between the provision of higher levels of schooling and earlier labour market entries. A fundamental education reform in Germany tackles this trade-off by reducing high school by one year while leaving the total instructional time unchanged. Employing administrative data on all high school graduates in 2002-2013 in Germany, we exploit both temporal and regional variation ...

The Parental Leave Benefit: A Key Family Policy Measure, One Decade Later

On January 1, 2017, the parental leave benefit will be celebrating its tenth anniversary. Although its implementation was fervidly debated, it has become a widely accepted family policy measure. Its impact on parental labor supply, the division oflabor between parents, fertility, and indicators that reflect the well-being of parents and children have been examined from a variety of perspectives. A ...

Parental Labour Supply Responses to the Abolition of Day Care Fees

This paper provides evidence that low private contributions to highly subsidised day care constrain mothers from working longer hours. We study the effects of a reform that abolished day care fees in Germany on parental labour supply. The reform removed private contributions to highly subsidised day care in the year before children enter primary school. We exploit the staggered reform across states ...

The Impact of Domestic Child Care on School Performance

Family

Family policy gained considerable relevance which is reflected by the current public attention to family issues. In regard to many recommendations of the KVI in 2001 improvements can be reported which family research profited from in a considerable way. However, pertaining to quality and content progress in data provision since the beginning of the 21st century was limited. Particularly, the availability ...

A Microeconometric Analysis of Labour Supply for the FRG and the USA