Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Social Identity and Competitive Behaviour Experimental evidence from East and West Germany

We investigate the impact of gender identity on competitive and risk-taking behaviour of women and men in Germany. In a choice experiment, we compare the decision behaviour between individuals whose gender identities have been made salient through priming techniques and a control group of untreated individuals. All participants make choices for a set of 23 binary options of payment schemes for a maze ...

Measuring Income Inequality in Euroland

Absent from Work? The Impact of Household and Work Conditions in Germany

This contribution investigates sickness absences of German men and women from a longitudinal perspective. The article tests hypotheses on household context and paid working conditions as determinants for men’s and women’s absences from employment. The empirical analysis is based on selected waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) between 1985 and 2001. The results of ordered probit estimations ...

The wage gap and the leisure gap for double earner couples

The Life-Cycle Hypothesis Revisited: Evidence on Housing Consumption after Retirement

According to the life-cycle theory of consumption and saving, foreseeable retirement events should not reduce consumption. Whereas some consumption expenditures may fall when goods are self-produced (given higher leisure after retirement), this argument applies especially to housing consumption which can hardly be substituted by home production. We test this hypothesis using micro data for Germany ...

New spouse, same chores? The division of household labor in consecutive unions

This article investigates domestic sphere investments, that is, housework and childcare time, of spouses in two consecutive relationships and aims to identify potential sources of variation. Economic reasoning would predict a learning effect from one partnership to the next, and hence less specialization in the domestic sphere in the second relationship. Prevailing gender norms or institutions, on ...

How Much Does a Year off Cost? Estimating the Wage Effects of Employment Breaks and Part-Time Periods

The 60s turnaround as a test on the causal relationship between sociability and happiness

The nexus between relational life and life satisfaction is riddled with endogeneity problems. By investigating the causal relationship going from the first to the second variable we consider that retirement is a shock which increases the time investable in (outside job) relational life. As a consequence we instrument investment in relational goods with the aggregate exogenous age-retirement pattern. ...

Children, happiness and taxation

Empirical analyses on the determinants of life satisfaction often include the impact of the number of children variable among available controls without fully discriminating between the two (socio- relational and pecuniary) components. In our empirical analysis on the German Socioeconomic Panel we show that, when introducing household income without correction for the number of members, the pecuniary ...

The relationship between social leisure and life satisfaction

Social leisure is generally found to be positively correlated with life satisfaction in the empirical literature. We ask if this association captures a genuine causal effect of this good on subjective wellbeing by using panel data from the GSOEP. Fixed effect estimation techniques take care of some but not all of the endogeneity issues involved: we then have recourse to instrumental variables estimation. ...