Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

The Effect of Compulsory Schooling on Vaccination Against COVID

We study the effect of education on vaccination against COVID in Germany in a sample of individuals above the age of 60. In ordinary least squares regressions, we find that, in this age group, one more year of education goes along with a 0.7 percentage point increase in the likelihood to get a COVID vaccination. In two stage least squares regressions where changes in compulsory schooling laws are used ...

The GC Wealth Project Data Warehouse v.1 – Documentation

The GC Wealth Project, a central project of the Graduate Center’s Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, is a multi-year effort aimed at expanding and consolidating access to the most up-to-date research and information on wealth, wealth inequalities, and wealth transfers and related tax policies, across countries and over time. The GC Wealth Project website — first launched in June 2023 — is organized ...

Assessing the Measurement Quality of Justice Evaluations of Earnings in Europe

How individuals perceive the fairness of their pay carries profound implications for individuals and society. Perceptions of pay injustice are linked to a spectrum of negative outcomes, including diminished well-being, poor health, increased stress, and depressive symptoms, alongside various detrimental effects in the work domain. Despite the far-reaching impact of these justice evaluations, validity ...

The Role of Polygenic Indices in Inequality of Opportunity

Equality of opportunity is a principle of social justice, although there are different conceptions of it. We distinguish between fair and luck egalitarian equality of opportunity. Both conceptions consider to be unfair inequalities in life chances resulting from ascribed characteristics such as social origin and sex. They differ, however, in that fair equality of opportunity considers it fair when ...

Homeownership rates, housing policies, and co-residence decisions

Homeownership rates differ widely across European countries. We document that part of this variation is driven by differences in the fraction of adults co-residing with their parents. Comparing Germany and Italy, we show that in contrast to homeownership rates per household, homeownership rates per individual are very similar during the first part of the life cycle. To understand these patterns, we ...

Urban Green Is More than the Absence of City: Structural and Functional Neural Basis of Urbanicity and Green Space in the Neighbourhood of Older Adults

The relationship between urbanization, the brain, and human mental health is subject to intensive debate in the current scientific literature. Particularly, since mood and anxiety disorders as well as schizophrenia are known to be more frequent in urban compared to rural regions. Here, we investigated the association between cerebral signatures, mental health and land use indicators (Urban Fabric and ...

Health implications of housing retrofits: Evidence from a population-wide weatherization program

This study provides the first population-representative quasi-experimental estimates on the impact of housing upgrades on occupant health. We analyze the exceptional period of renovations in East Germany following the German reunification during the 1990s. Triggered by one of the largest governmental loan programs in history, 3.6 million dwellings were renovated, focussing on upgrades to the building ...

Temporary employment and first births: A path analysis of the underlying mechanisms using Australian and German panel data

In many countries, temporary work is negatively associated with fertility. Yet, the mechanisms underlying this relationship remain poorly understood. This study investigates a range of mediating pathways (subjective and objective financial situation, short tenure, and employment uncertainty) through which temporary work influences first births in two contrasting contexts: Australia and Germany. Event ...

Immigration, segregation, and attitudes toward immigrants: a longitudinal multiscalar analysis across egohoods

Evidence on how proximity to ethnic outgroups shapes attitudes toward immigration remains inconclusive. We suggest this may be driven, in part, by the fact that studies rarely account for the role of residential segregation. We argue that how the minority-share in an environment affects majority-group attitudes will depend on how segregated groups are from one another. To explore this, we undertake ...

Essays in Empirical Labour Economics (Dissertation)