Obituary for Richard Hauser

Professor Dr. Richard Hauser passed away in early April at the age of 89. With his death, the SOEP longitudinal study loses one of its founding fathers, long-time promoters, and consistently reliable supporters. Richard Hauser, together with his colleagues from the fields of economics and sociology, launched the SOEP in the early 1980s and significantly shaped its survey design and measurement concepts.

Until his retirement in 2001, Professor Dr. Richard Hauser held a chair in economics, specializing in distribution and social policy, at the Faculty of Economics at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. With his extensive empirical research experience in the fields of social policy and empirical poverty research, Richard Hauser significantly influenced key aspects of the SOEP longitudinal study. For many years, he served as spokesperson for the DFG Collaborative Research Center 3 "Microanalytical Foundations of Social Policy" at the Universities of Frankfurt am Main and Mannheim. After the Collaborative Research Center 3 (SFB 3) ended, Richard Hauser served on the SOEP Advisory Board of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin) from 1991 to 1997. In 2008, he and Richard Burkhauser were jointly awarded the Felix Büchel Award. As a long-time colleague and driving force, Richard Hauser made a lasting contribution to the development and scientific success of the SOEP.

Our thoughts are with his family.

We will honor his memory.