Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Relational Goods, Sociability, and Happiness

This paper empirically investigates the impact of relational goods on individual life satisfaction. By relational goods we indicate the affective/expressive, non instrumental, side of interpersonal relationships. The homo oeconomicus view of human nature is questioned by the recent upsurge of empirical studies on the determinants of self declared happiness, that show that an increasing income ...

When Money Does not Buy Happiness: The Case of "Frustrated Achievers"

An increase in real per capita income is generally expected to be associated with nonnegative variations in life satisfaction. The alternative (association with negative changes) is generally defined as “frustrated achievement” [Graham, C., Pettinato, S., 2002. Happiness and Hardship: Opportunity and Insecurity in New Market Economies. The Brookings Institution Press,Washington, D.C.]. We investigate ...

In Good Company – Neighborhood Quality and Female Employment

Using a uniquely assembled panel dataset, we estimate the impact of neighborhood and peer effects on female labor supply. Nonrandom sorting and unobserved heterogeneity at the individual and neighborhood levels make recovering these impact parameters more complicated in the absence of (quasi-)experimental variation in neighborhood attributes. Our estimation strategy rests on using a hedonic pricing ...

Tenure Choice, Residential Mobility and Housing Demand in Germany: a Longitudinal Analysis (Dissertation)

Monitoring National Perceptions: The Case of German Unification

Panel Regression of Arbitrarily Distributed Responses

The Pursuit of Happiness

Changes in Union Membership Over Time: A Panel Analysis for West Germany

The Relationship Between Economic Preferences and Psychological Personality Measures

Although both economists and psychologists seek to identify determinants of heterogeneity in behavior, they use different concepts to capture them. In this review, we first analyze the extent to which economic preferences and psychological concepts of personality, such as the Big Five and locus of control, are related. We analyze data from incentivized laboratory experiments and representative samples ...

Labour Economic Outcomes and the Returns to Language Acquisition: A Comparative Study of Refugees and Economic Immigrants in Germany

This paper analyses the differences in labour economic and language outcomes between refugees and economic immigrants in Germany. We use data from the German Socioeconomic Panel (GSOEP), a yearly household survey of the population of Germany. Analysing the period from 1994 to 2014, we study only immigrants working at the time of survey. We find that working refugees, on average, earn between 17.6 and ...