Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Earnings Inequality in Europe: Structure and Patterns of Inter-Temporal Changes

The Determinants of Reservation Wages in Germany: Does a Motivation Gap Exist?

This paper investigates the reservation wages of unemployed persons on the basis of a job-search model with non-static reservation wages using panel data from Germany from 1987 to 1998. The results suggest that reservation wages are relatively high in Germany compared to other countries. Furthermore, pooled regression results show that most recent wages and personal characteristics of the unemployed ...

Poverty Comparisons

There has been considerable interest in contextual effects on well-being. The size of the relationship between own individual ill-health and unemployment, for example, has been shown to depend on the extent of ill-health and unemployment in the local area. We here use almost 30 years of German panel data to ask whether such contextual effects also apply to income poverty. We do so by looking at the ...

Lags and Leads in Life Satisfaction: A Test of the Baseline Hypothesis

Happy House: Spousal Weight and Individual Well-Being

We use life satisfaction and Body Mass Index (BMI) information from three waves of the SOEP to test for social interactions in BMI between spouses. Social interactions require that the cross-partial effect of partner’s weight and own weight in the utility function be positive. Using life satisfaction as a utility proxy, semi-parametric regressions show that the correlation between satisfaction and ...

Heterogeneity and Measures of Well-being: Evidence from Twelve European Countries

This paper models the relationship between income and reported well-being using latent class techniques applied to panel data from twelve European countries. Introducing both intercept and slope heterogeneity into this relationship, we strongly reject the hypothesis that individuals transform income into well-being in the same way. We show that both individual characteristics and country of residence ...

The Great Happiness Moderation

This paper shows that within-country happiness inequality has fallen in the majority of countries that have experienced positive income growth over the last forty years, in particular in developed countries. This new stylized fact comes as an addition to the Easterlin paradox, which states that the time trend in average happiness is flat during episodes of long-run income growth. This mean-preserving ...

The Great Happiness Moderation: Well-being Inequality during Episodes of Income Growth

Economic Growth Evens Out Happiness: Evidence from Six Surveys

In spite of the great U-turn that saw income inequality rise in Western countries in the 1980s, happiness inequality has dropped in countries that experienced income growth (but not in those that did not). Modern growth has reduced the share of both the "very unhappy" and the "perfectly happy". The extension of public amenities has certainly contributed to this greater happiness ...

Income and happiness: Evidence, explanations and economic implications