The research on private financial transfers between generations lacks a longitudinal perspective. Gifts as intergenerational transfers inter vivos allow us to study the importance of life course events for the chances of receiving transfers. In Germany, gifts are highly private and leave more...

This research investigates how family events in adult children’s lives influence the timing of their parents’ financial transfers. We draw on retrospective data collected by the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) and use event history models to study the effects of marriage, divorce,...

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...

In light of the recent interest in using longitudinal panel data to study personality development, it is important to know if personality traits are related to panel attrition. We analyse the effects of personality on panel drop-out separately for an ‘older' subsample (started in 1984), a...

Evidence of assortative mating according to personality was reported in a previous SOEP-based study (Rammstedt & Schupp, 2008). Based on population representative data of almost 7,000 couples, high levels of congruence between spouses were found, which increased with marriage duration. Almost...

Objective: Older adults more often complain about sleep disturbances compared to younger adults. However, it is not clear whether there is still a decline of sleep quality after age 60 and whether changes in sleep quality in old age are mere reflections of impaired physical health or whether...