Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Different strokes for different folks: The job satisfaction of the self-employed and the intersection of gender and migration background

Purpose: Migrant enterprises comprise about 10 per cent of all enterprises in Germany and are therefore a crucial part of the German economy and its entrepreneurial ecosystems. Relatedly, migrant entrepreneurship is a highly recognized topic within political discussions as well as within entrepreneurship research. While there is already an impressive body of work regarding the nature and quality of ...

Broadband Internet, Digital Temptations, and Sleep

There is a growing concern that the widespread use of computers, mobile phones and other digital devices before bedtime disrupts our sleep with detrimental effects on our health and cognitive performance. High-speed Internet promotes the use of electronic devices, video games and Internet addiction (e.g., online games and cyberloafing). Exposure to artificial light from tablets and PCs can alterate ...

Does Broadband Internet Affect Fertility?

The spread of high-speed (broadband) Internet epitomizes the digital revolution. Using German panel data, we test whether the availability of broadband influences fertility choices in a low-fertility setting well known for the difficulty in combining work and family life. We exploit a strategy devised by Falck and colleagues to obtain causal estimates of the impact of broadband on fertility. We find ...

Entrepreneurial success and subjective well-being: Worries about the business explain one's well-being loss from self-employment

Despite lower incomes the self-employed often report higher job satisfaction. But this increased job satisfaction only sometimes translates into higher life satisfaction, likely due to the heterogeneous nature of self-employment. By distinguishing different types of self-employment, this paper sheds light onto why some self-employeds even report lower life satisfaction, focussing specifically on poor ...

Environmental concerns, volunteering and subjective well-being: Antecedents and outcomes of environmental activism in Germany

Do perceptions about the state of the environment impact on individuals' well-being and do they lead to environmental activism? While the impact of objective features of the environment (e.g., pollution, parks) is well-researched, the present paper fills a research gap by analyzing how concerns about the environment impact on subjective well-being. Based on German panel data (SOEP) for the years ...

How Satisfied are the Self-Employed? A Life Domain View

It is well-known in the literature that self-employment positively influences job satisfaction, but the effects on other life domains and overall life satisfaction are much less clear. Our study analyzes the welfare effects of self-employment apart from its monetary aspects, and focuses on the overall life satisfaction as well as different domain satisfactions of self-employed individuals in our German ...

The Structure of Subjective Well-being: A Vector Autoregressive Approach

We use panel vector autoregressions to analyze the underlying structure of changes in subjective well-being and its coevolution with changes in income, health, worries, marital status and employment status for the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) data set. We find that positive changes in the named life domains are followed by decreases in subjective well-being (except for health, which is followed ...

The Effect of Occupational Mismatch on Overqualification - An Empirical Analysis for Germany Using a Simultaneous Equations Model.

Income Variation Amoung West German Households

The Welfare Cost of Income Uncertainty. A Nonparametric Analysis of Households in the United States and Western Germany