Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Smarter every day: The deceleration of population ageing in terms of cognition

Cognitive decline correlates with age-associated health risks and has been shown to be a good predictor of future morbidity and mortality. Cognitive functioning can therefore be considered an important measure of differential ageing across cohorts and population groups. Here, we investigate if and why individuals aged 50+ born into more recent cohorts perform better in terms of cognition than their ...

Adequacy of Pension Systems in Europe: An Analysis Based on Comprehensive Replacement Rates

Providing access for all individuals to appropriate pension entitlements, public and/or private, which allow them to maintain, to a reasonable degree, their standard of living after retirement is considered a social policy objective.1 An exploration of the above objective can be performed by comparing the individuals’ living standards when active and when retired. The aim of this paper is to develop ...

The Economics and Psychology of Personality Traits

This paper explores the interface between personality psychology and economics. We examine the predictive power of personality and the stability of personality traits over the life cycle. We develop simple analytical frameworks for interpreting the evidence in personality psychology and suggest promising avenues for future research.

Do Older Worker Have More Trouble Using a Computer than Younger Worker?

The Diffusion of Computers and the Distribution of Wages

Revenue and Distributional Effects of the Current Tax Reform Proposals in Germany - An Evaluation by Microsimulation

Implications of an Aging Population: A Comparative Analysis of West Germany an the United States

Aging in Germany and the United States: International Comparisons

Understanding fixed effects in human well-being

In studies of subjective well-being, economists and other researchers typically use a fixed or random effect estimation to control for unobservable heterogeneity across individuals. Such individual heterogeneity, although substantially reducing the estimated effect of many characteristics, is little understood. This paper shows that personality measures can account for 20% of this heterogeneity and ...

Personality and the marginal utility of income: Personality interacts with increases in household income to determine life satisfaction

Economics implicitly assumes that the marginal utility of income is independent of an individual's personality. We show that this is wrong. This is the first demonstration that there are strong personality–income interactions. In an analysis of 13,615 individuals over 4-years we show that individuals who have high levels of conscientiousness obtain more satisfaction to their lives from increases ...