The German Socio Economic Panel Study (SOEP) offers the rare opportunity to look at patterns of given names amongst a representative sample of more than 50,000 people born since 1900. This article develops an exemplary picture of typical frequency distributions for given names and their...

This paper analyses the income effect of the participation in elite sports. To quantify the average difference in the monthly net income of former elite athletes and non-athletes we estimate sample average treatment effect scores (SATT) by using covariate nearest-neighbour matching (CVM). While...

Social security entitlements are a substantial source of wealth that grows in importance over the individual's lifecycle. Despite its quantitative relevance, social security wealth has been thus far omitted from wealth inequality analyses. In Germany, it is the lack of adequate micro data that...

Sleep is an important part of life, with an individual spending an estimated 32 years of her life asleep. Despite this importance, little is known about life satisfaction and sleep duration. Using German panel data, it is shown that sleep is an important factor for life satisfaction and that...

In dieser Arbeit kommt ein neuer ökonometrischer Ansatz für Paneldaten zum Einsatz, welcher den Umgang mit persistenter, unbeobachtbarer Heterogenität in allgemeinen nichtseparablen und nonparametrischen Konstellationen ermöglicht. Der Ansatz geht zurück auf Hoderlein und White (2009)....

This paper analyzes the determinants of annual worker reallocation across disaggregated occupations in western Germany for the period 1985-2003. Employing data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, the pattern of average occupational mobility is documented. Worker reallocation is found to be...

In Germany, there is no trade union membership wage premium, while the membership fee amounts to 1% of the gross wage. Therefore, prima facie, there are strong incentives to freeride on the benefits of trade unionism. We establish empirical evidence for a private gain from trade union membership...

Theory suggests that subjective well-being is affected by income comparisons and adaptation to income. Empirical tests of the effects often rely on self-constructed measures from survey data. This paper shows that results can be highly sensitive to simple parameter changes. Using large-scale...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of reference-dependent effects of unemployment on mental well-being. We show that the negative effect of unemployment on mental well-being depends on expectations about the future employment status. Several contributions to the literature have shown that...

This paper investigates the effects of urban green and abandoned areas on residential well-being in major German cities, using panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) for the time period between 2000 and 2012 and cross-section data from the European Urban Atlas (EUA) for the year...