As from a political economy perspective, politicians often fail to implement structural reforms, we investigate if the resistance to reform is based on the differences in the risk preferences of voters, politicians, and bureaucrats. Based on the empirical results of a survey of the population in...

Perceived control plays an important role in shaping development throughout adulthood and old age. Using data from the adult lifespan sample of the national German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP; N 10,000, covering 25 years of measurement), we explored long-term antecedents, correlates, and...

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 study presents results of the validation of an ultra-short survey measure of patience included in the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Survey responses predict intertemporal choice behavior in incentive-compatible decisions in a representative sample of the German adult population

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...

Like many medical studies, the Berlin Aging Study II (BASE‐II) is based on a non‐random "convenience sample" of self‐recruited participants. To study processes of selectivity in BASE‐II, we used an identical questionnaire to compare BASE‐II with a large, representative reference study,...

In this paper we discuss the rationale for tracing non-original sample members (Non-OSMs) in household panel studies, and in particular in SOEP, and the implications for weighting. We present results on the incidence, survival rates, and thus the relevance of Non-OSMs in the SOEP

We investigate how worries in Germany change across time and age, drawing on both closed-ended questions (which typically list a number of worry items) and open-ended questions answered in text format. We find that relevant world events influence worries. For example, worries about peace peaked...

German Abstract: Dieses Papier charakterisiert die SOEP-Nutzer, beschreibt ihre Zufriedenheit mit dem SOEP-Service und untersucht ihre Nutzungsgewohnheiten bei der Arbeit mit den Daten. Die Untersuchungen bauen primär auf den Daten der SOEP-Nutzerbefragungen 2004, 2011, 2012 und 2013 auf....

Self-reported measures of health are generally treated as weak measures of respondents’ objective health status. On the other hand, most surveys use self-reported health to measure health status and to determine the effects of a range of other socio-economic characteristics of the local...