Forschung SOEP: Soziale Ungleichheiten und Verteilung

Refugees Send Remittances Abroad Less Often than Other Migrants

Remittances sent by refugees to their home countries has been a hotly debated policy topic in Germany over the past years and has led to the introduction of a payment card for asylum applicants. This Weekly Report investigates how the share of people living in Germany who send remittances abroad has changed over time according to their migration background (with or without a refugee background) and ...

Cross-national Differences in Socioeconomic Achievement Inequality in Early Primary School: The Role of Parental Education and Income in Six Countries

This paper presents comparative information on the strength of the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and literacy skills at ages 6–8, drawing on data from France, Germany, Japan, Rotterdam (Netherlands), the United Kingdom, and the United States. We investigate whether the strength of the association between SES and literacy skills in early-to-mid childhood depends on the operationalization ...

Auslandsüberweisungen spielen eine essenzielle Rolle bei der Entwicklungshilfe: Interview

Geflüchtete senden seltener Geld ins Ausland als andere Migrant*innen

Über Geldüberweisungen von Geflüchteten in ihre Heimat wurde in den vergangenen Jahren in Deutschland politisch scharf debattiert, was zur Einführung einer Bezahlkarte für Asylbewerber*innen führte. Die vorliegende Studie untersucht, wie sich der Anteil der in Deutschland lebenden Personen, die Geld ins Ausland überweisen, im Laufe der Zeit je nach Migrationshintergrund – mit oder ohne Fluchthintergrund ...

Geteilte Zuständigkeiten

The Distribution of National Income in Germany, 1992-2019

This paper analyzes the distribution and composition of pre-tax national income in Germany since 1992, combining personal income tax returns, household survey data, and national accounts. Inequality rose from the 1990s to the late 2000s due to falling labor incomes among the bottom 50% and rising incomes in the top 10%. This trend reversed after 2007 as labor incomes across the bottom 90% increased. ...

Does Cognitive Reflection Relate to Preferences and Socio-Economic Outcomes?

Cognitive abilities are associated with key preferences and socio-economic outcomes. One of the most frequently studied cognitive abilities is cognitive reflection, the ability to avoid intuitive but potentially wrong decisions by switching to a more analytical mindset. Using rich panel data in this pre-registered study, we show that stronger cognitive reflection is significantly associated with more ...

Income-Dependent Equivalence Scales and Choice Theory: Implications for Poverty Measurement

The study of poverty is at the heart of economics, and the goal of overcoming it drives the efforts of policy-makers worldwide. Meeting such goals requires confidence (a) in the tools we have to measure poverty, and (b) in our understanding of the determinants of poverty. Here, we focus on the role of household composition in the measurement and analysis of poverty. After presenting some core concepts, ...

De-Routinization of Jobs and the Distribution Of Earnings: A Cross-Country Comparison

The Routine-Biased Technological Change hypothesis (RBTC) by Autor et al. (2023) suggests that automation processes have substituted workers operating middle-skilled routine tasks. As a result, the relative demand for complementary workers operating non-routine tasks has increased. These changes in the labor force composition imply job polarization, characterized by a growing proportion of both high- ...

Born in the Land of Milk and Honey: Hometown Growth and Individual Wealth Accumulation

How does economic growth affect the distribution of wealth? Combining wealth records from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and local GDP growth across 401 German counties, this paper documents a sizable Hometown-Growth-Wealth Nexus. Using a standard OLG model to guide our estimation strategy, we nd that, because of hometown growth, a person born in flourishing Munich will have accumulated two to three ...

The Long-Term Implications of Destruction During the Second World War on Private Wealth in Germany

By the end of the Second World War, an estimated 20% of the West German housing stock had been destroyed. Building on a theoretical life-cycle model, this paper examines the persistent consequences of the war for individual wealth across generations. As our empirical basis, we link a unique historical dataset on the levels of wartime destruction in 1739 West German cities with micro data on individual ...

Wealth Creators or Inheritors? Unpacking the Gender Wealth Gap from Bottom To Top and Young to Old

There is growing interest in understanding how gender influences the accumulation of wealth. While prior studies focused on labor-related determinants, our research focuses on inheritances and gifts. Using unique survey data that oversamples the top 1% of wealth holders in Germany, we show that the gender wealth gap is small for individuals up to age 40, then widens, and declines for those past retirement ...

Urban Inequalities and Diversities in Germany

Germany has emerged over centuries as a central European country marked by political shifts that have resulted in deep regional fragmentation. The polit ical burdens of two world wars led, in the late 1940s, to a separation of the country into the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the western Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), a separation that ended with German (re)unification in ...

Private Vermögen: Höhe, Entwicklung und Verteilung

Einkommensentwicklung und Armut nach Bevölkerungsgruppen: Verteilung, Angleichung, Dynamik

Sozialbericht 2024: Ein Datenreport für Deutschland

Leibniz ScienceCampus: Regional Development Dynamics and their Social, Economic and Political Consequences (SOEP-RegioHub)

Der Leibniz Wissenschaftscampus SOEP-RegioHub untersucht, wie regionale Unterschiede in Deutschland – beispielsweise in strukturellen, demografischen und wirtschaftlichen Bereichen – den gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt beeinflussen und sich auf politische Einstellungen und Verhaltensweisen auswirken. Ziel ist es, ein tieferes Verständnis für die komplexen Wechselwirkungen zwischen regionalen...

Sozialbericht 2024 veröffentlicht: Wie steht es um die Lebensverhältnisse in Deutschland?

Am Mittwoch, den 6. November 2024, wurde der Sozialbericht 2024 vorgestellt, der in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Sozio-oekonomischen Panel entstanden ist. Herausgeber sind das Statistische Bundesamt (Destatis), das Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB) und das Bundesinstitut für Bevölkerungsforschung (BiB). Der Sozialbericht (bisher: „Datenreport“) enthält zahlreiche Analysen zu den Lebensverhältnissen ...

Stock Market Participation, Work from Home, and Inequality

Stock market participation among working household heads jumped upwards in 2020-in Germany by about 25%. A major cause is the required use of work from home (WfH). We show this by repeating a benchmark study and adding WfH to the explanatory variables. Moreover, we implement an instrumental variables estimation based on industry-specific levels of WfH-capacity. The transmission channels seem to work ...

The German Social Cohesion Panel (SCP): Theoretical Background, Instruments, Survey Design, and Analytical Potential

The German Social Cohesion Panel (SCP) is a probability-based self-administered longitudinal study in a mixed-mode design (PAPI and CAWI) that is jointly carried out by the Research Institute Social Cohesion (RISC) and the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). The aim of the study is to capture the diversity of social cohesion in Germany from multiple perspectives, particularly regarding the extent to ...