The availability of panel data on the basis of micro data has become an indispensable component of the infrastructure of empirically oriented social scientists and economists. This is also a consequence of the fact that, for a panel survey, the quality of both content and methodological analyses...

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...

This paper discusses how household panels in general - and the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) in particular - an serve as reference data for researchers collecting datasets that do not represent the full universe of the population of interest (e.g., through clinical trials, intervention...

A particular shortcoming of panel surveys is potential bias arising from selective attrition. Based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) we analyze potential artifacts (level, structure, inequality of income) by comparing results from two independently drawn panel...

To the best of our knowledge, most of the few methodological studies which analyze the impact of faked interviews on survey results are based on "artificial fakes" generated by project students in a "laboratory environment". In contrast, panel data provide a unique opportunity to identify data...

After the introduction in Section 2, we very briefly sketch out current theoretical and empirical developments in the social sciences. In our view, they all point in the same direction: toward the acute and increasing need for multidisciplinary longitudinal data covering a wide range of living...