This article examines the impact of unemployment on social participation for Germany using the German Socio-Economic Panel. We find significant negative, robust and, for some activities, lasting effects of unemployment on social participation. Causality is established by focussing on plant...

How socio-cultural contexts shape individual functioning is of prime interest for psychological inquiry. Secular increases favoring later-born cohorts in fluid intelligence measures are widely documented for young adults. In the current study, we quantify such trends in old age using data from...

This paper evaluates the relationship between job satisfaction and measures of health of workers using the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). Methodologically, it addresses two important design problems encountered frequently in the literature: (a) cross-sectional causality problems and (b)...

This paper analyzes the influence of children's health and mothers' physical and mental wellbeing on female labor force participation after childbirth in Germany. Our analysis uses data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study, which enables us to measure children's health based on the...

The social norm of unemployment suggests that aggregate unemployment reduces the wellbeing of the employed, but has a far smaller effect on the unemployed. We use German panel data to reproduce this standard result, but then suggest that the appropriate distinction may not be between employment...

Using representative income and time use-data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we estimate non-monetary income advantages arising from home production and analyse their impact on economic inequality. As an alternative to existing measures, we propose a predicted wage approach based...

This paper employs a multidimensional approach for the measurement of well-being at the top of the distribution using German SOEP micro data. Besides income as traditional indicator for material well-being, we include health as a proxy for nonmaterial quality of life as well as self-reported...

This paper uses concurrently and - for the first time - retrospectively reported life satisfaction from the 1984 to 1987 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel to study the importance of different comparison standards for the empirical correlation of unemployment and subjective life...

Despite the relatively extensive research on pay levels and the consequences of income disparities, little is known about which reference groups people choose for comparative evaluation of personal income and why different selection patterns emerge. The aim of this paper is to dig deeper for...

Lifespan psychological research has long been interested in the contextual embeddedness of individual development. To examine if and how regional factors relate to between-person disparities in the progression of late-life well-being, we applied three-level growth curve models to 24-year...