Recently, building on the highly polarizing Stiglitz report, a growing literature suggests that statistical offices and applied researchers explore other aspects of human welfare apart from material well-being, such as job security, crime, health, environmental factors and subjective...

The SOEP Group currently is preparing in addition to increasing the size of the core SOEP, to establish a new Innovation Sample (SOEP-IS). This will be established for the period 2012 to 2017 (with a cumulative number of presumably N=5,000 households). Now, in the year 2012, a new subsample is...

The article analyzes the question of whether career politicians differ systematically from the general population in terms of their attitudes toward risk. A written survey of members of the 17th German Bundestag in late 2011 identified their risk attitudes, and the survey data was set in...

The paper gives an overview of two experiments implemented in the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) considering the effect of monetary incentives on cross-sectional and longitudinal response propensities. We conclude that the overall effects of monetary incentives on response rates are positive...

Long term panel data enable researchers to construct Life Satisfaction (LS) trajectories for individuals over time. In this paper we analyse the trajectories of respondents in the German Socio-Economic Panel who recorded their LS for 20 consecutive years in 1991-2010. Previous research has shown...

Background: The National Cohort (Nationale Kohorte=NaKo) will be one of the largest cohort studies in Europe to include intensive physical examinations and extensive information about the socio‐demographic background and behavior of the subjects. However, regional selectivity of the study and...

An adequate theory of Life Satisfaction (LS) needs to take account of both factors that tend to stabilise LS and those that change it. The most widely accepted theory in the recent past – set-point theory – focussed solely on stability (Brickman and Campbell, 1971; Lykken and Tellegen, 1996)....

This study examines the phenomenon of nonresponse in the first wave of a refresher sample (subsample H) of the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP). Our first step is to link additional (commercial) microgeographic data on the immediate neighborhoods of the households visited by...

Throughout adulthood and old age, levels of well-being appear to remain relatively stable. However, evidence is emerging that late in life well-being declines considerably. Using long-term longitudinal data of deceased participants in national samples from Germany, the UK, and the US, we examine...

Using a unique dataset we study both the actual and self-perceived relationship between subjective well-being and income comparisons against a wide range of potential comparison groups, enabling us to investigate a broader range of questions than in previous studies. In questions inserted into a...