Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

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.

The Socio-Economic Module of the Berlin Aging Study II (SOEP-BASE): Description, Structure, and Questionnaire

The Berlin Aging Study II (BASE-II) is a multidisciplinary study that allows for the investigation of how a multitude of health status factors as well as many other social and economic outcomes interplay. The sample consists of 1,600 participants aged 60 to 80, and 600 participants aged 20 to 35. The socio-economic part of BASE-II, the so called SOEPBASE, is conducted by the SOEP Group at the DIW Berlin. ...

Mothers' Employment in Wealthy Countries: How Do Cultural and Institutional Factors Shape the Motherhood Employment and Working Hours Gap

Existing research shows that women’s employment patterns are not so much driven by gender, as by gendered parenthood, with childless women and men (including fathers) employed at substantially higher levels than mothers in most countries. We focus on the cross-national variation in the gap in employment participation and working time between mothers and women without children in the same household. ...

The dynamics of housing tenure choice: Lessons from Germany and the United States

This paper investigates the likelihood and timing of housing tenure choice dynamics including both the initial transition to homeownership, and possible transitions back to rental tenure and to an additional owned home. This is done across the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). Further, housing price data is added for both countries. For the US, data ...