Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Finding a job: Consequences for life satisfaction and interactions with job quality

Is Any Job Better than No Job? Life Satisfaction and Re-employment

Using data for West Germany from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we analyse the impact of transitions from unemployment to full-time employment on life satisfaction, with special focus on the influence of job quality. We apply various indicators of job quality (self-reported job satisfaction, wages, type of contract, and indicators of the fit between the worker and job requirements). We control for ...

Wages as Risk Compensation in Germany

Do Firms Pay for Perceived Risks at Work?

Severance Payments for Dismissed Employees in Germany

Economic Security

Competitive Escalation and Interventions

Competitive escalation occurs frequently in managerial environments, when decisions create sunk costs and decision makers compete under time pressure. In a series of experiments using a minimal dollar auction paradigm, we test interventions to prevent competitive escalation. Without any intervention, most people, including experienced managers, escalate and lose money by bidding more than the price ...

The ABC of Social Desires: Affiliation, Being Alone, and Closeness to Partner

We propose a triadic model of social desires directed at appetence/aversion of affiliation with friends (A), being alone (B), and closeness to one’s partner (C) that account for individual differences in subjectively experienced needs for proximity and distance in serious couple relationships. The model assumes that A, B, and C can be conceptualized at the individual level as correlated latent factors ...

Changing educational gradient in long-term care-free life expectancy among German men, 1997-2012

Background: The inverse association between mortality and individual socioeconomic status is well-documented. Due to the lack of appropriate data, little is known about the nature of this association among individuals with long-term care (LTC) needs. Objectives: We aim to fill in this knowledge gap by estimating life expectancy (LE), life expectancy without (CFLE) and with (CLE) long-term care by education ...

Optimal Taxation: The Design of Child Related Cash- and In-Kind-Benefits

This paper contributes to the debate about the optimal design of tax-transfer systems. Based on the theory of optimal taxation, combined with microsimulation and microeconometric techniques we derive the welfare function which makes the current German tax and transfer system for single women optimal. Furthermore, we compare the welfare function conditional on the presence and age of children and asses ...