Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Differences in the Patterns of in-work Poverty in Germany and the UK

This study analyses differences in individual-level working poverty determinants between Germany and the UK. These differences are linked to institutional patterns at the country level. Here, we observe that the two countries differ especially in bargaining centralisation, employment protection legislation and family policy. At the same time, the levels of decommodification and labour market regulation ...

The Individual in Context(s): Research Potentials of the Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) in Sociology

The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study is a rich resource for sociologists, mainly because it offers direct measures of respondents’ contexts. The SOEP data provide (i) information retrieved from individuals themselves, (ii) direct information retrieved from their parents, partners, and organizations, (iii) prospectively collected information on past characteristics, and (iv) regional and spatial ...

Motherhood and mental well-being in Germany: Linking a longitudinal life course design and the gender perspective on motherhood

Based on considerations of societal mothering ideologies, qualitative gender studies suggest detrimental effects of motherhood on women’s mental well-being. However, numerous quantitative life course analyses find no such effect. This dissonance may originate in the measurement of well-being usually employed in longitudinal quantitative designs, which does not capture the dimensions of well-being identified ...

Measuring Well-Being: W3 Indicators to Complement GDP

Plenty of people in Germany, including politicians and researchers, believe that gross domestic product (GDP) is an outdated indicator of a society’s prosperity. Therefore, at the end of 2010, the German Bundestag, the federal parliament, established a study commission (Enquete Kommission) tasked with developing an alternative to GDP for measuring growth, wealth, and quality of life. This commission ...

The different roles of low-wage work in Germany: regional, demographical and temporal risk of low-paid workers

Editorial: From Panel Data to Longitudinal Analytical Designs: a Note on Contemporary Research Based on Data from the Socio Economic Panel Study (SOEP)

Risk attitude and risk behavior: Comparing Thailand and Vietnam.

Are responses to a simple survey item sufficiently reliable in eliciting risk attitudes? Our angle in examining reliability is to conduct comparative research across Thailand and Vietnam. We find, first, that the survey item is informative about individual risk attitude because it is plausibly related to socio-demographic characteristics (including vulnerability), it is experimentally validated and ...

Why Do German Men Marry Women from Less Developed Countries? An Analysis of Transnational Partner Search Based on the German Socio-Economic Panel

Decomposing permanent and transitory poverty

This paper proposes a new method of calculating the proportion of permanently impoverished persons among persons in poverty as a whole. The paper shows that the widely used Shorrocks-Index for decomposing permanent and transitory inequality can also be acquired to describe poverty. This method overcomes certain difficulties involved in the methods of Rodgers & Rodgers (1993). The characteristics ...

Income Polarisation in Germany is Rising

Income disparities between poorer and richer households in Germany have been widening since reunification. Although this income polarisation is reduced during economically favourable periods by strong growth in employment, once the good times are over, it rises all the faster. The longer-term trend not only shows that the number of poorer households is steadily increasing, but also that on average ...