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SOEP-Core – 2019: Sampling, Nonresponse, and Weighting in the Sample P

Bias in Tax Progressivity Estimates

Tax progressivity is central in public and political debates when questions of vertical equity are raised. Applied, structural research demands a simple way to capture it. A power function approximation delivers one parameter that captures the residual income elasticity - a summary measure of progressivity. This approximation is accurate, tractable, and interpretable, and hence immensely popular. The ...

Risk Preference and Entrepreneurial Investment at the Top of the Wealth Distribution

This study quantifies the distributional effects of the minimum wage introduced in Germany in 2015. Using detailed Socio-Economic Panel survey data, we assess changes in the hourly wages, working hours, and monthly wages of employees who were entitled to be paid the minimum wage. We employ a difference-in-differences analysis, exploiting regional variation in the “bite” of the minimum wage. At the ...

Hours Risk and Wage Risk: Repercussions over the Life Cycle

We decompose earnings risk into contributions from hours and wage shocks. To distinguish between hours shocks, modeled as innovations to the marginal disutility of work, and labor supply reactions to wage shocks, we formulate a life-cycle model of consumption and labor supply. For estimation, we use data on married American men from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Permanent wage shocks explain ...

The Personality Traits of Self-Made and Inherited Millionaires

Very wealthy people influence political and societal processes by wielding their economic power through foundations, lobbying groups, media campaigns, as investors and employers. Because personality shapes goals, attitudes, and behaviour, it is important to understand the personality traits that characterize the rich. We used representative survey data to construct two large samples, one from the general ...

A Novel Sampling Strategy for Surveying High Net-Worth Individuals: A Pretest Using the Socio-Economic Panel

High‐wealth individuals are typically underrepresented or completely missing in population surveys. The lack of comprehensive national registers on high‐wealth individuals in many countries challenged previous attempts to remedy this under‐representation. In a novel research design, we draw on public data on the shareholding structures of companies as a sampling frame. Our design builds on the empirical ...

The Economic Research Potentials of the German Socio-Economic Panel Study

We provide a concise introduction to a household-panel data infrastructure that provides the international research community with longitudinal data of private households in Germany since 1984: the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). We demonstrate the comparative strength of the SOEP data in answering economically-relevant questions by highlighting its diverse and impactful applications throughout ...

Inequality-Minimization with a Given Public Budget

We solve the problem of a social planner who seeks to minimize inequality via transfers with a fixed public budget in a distribution of exogenously given incomes. The appropriate solution method depends on the objective function: If it is convex, it can be solved by an interior-point algorithm. If it is quasiconvex, the bisection method can be used. Using artificial and real-world data, we implement ...

Distributional Effects of Subsidizing Retirement Savings Accounts: Evidence from Germany

We empirically investigate the distributional consequences of the Riester scheme, the main private pension subsidization program in Germany. We find that 38% of the aggregate subsidy accrues to the top two deciles of the income distribution, but only 7.3% to the bottom two. Nonetheless the Riester scheme is almost distributionally neutral in terms of standard inequality measures. Two effects offset ...

Public Health Insurance, Individual Health, and Entry into Self-Employment

We investigate the impact of a differential treatment of paid employees versus self-employed workers in a public health insurance system on the entry rate into self-employment. Health insurance systems that distinguish between the two sectors of employment create incentives or disincentives to start a business for different individuals. We estimate a discrete time hazard rate model of entry into self-employment ...