SOEP Research: Inequality and Mobility

Toward an Integrated Crisis Data Infrastructure in Germany: Linking the Socio-Economic Panel with Administrative Health Records

This paper examines the gaps in Germany’s data infrastructure for responding to crises, as revealed during COVID-19, and argues that linking the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) with administrative health records would strengthen the country’s ability to generate equity-sensitive evidence during future health-related crises. Drawing on evidence from the RKI-SOEP study, we illustrate the added value of combining ...

Combining a Survey Experiment with Lifecycle Models to Evaluate Pronatalist Policies

We develop a three-step procedure for ex-ante policy evaluation. It combines (i) a vignette survey that randomizes out-of-sample policies (child allowances and external childcare subsidies) to infer fertility responses; (ii) two applied-theory lifecycle models estimated on external microdata; and (iii) the inserting of the randomized policies into the models’ estimated fertility decision rules to obtain ...

Diffusion of Cumulative Advantage? How Wealth and Health Trajectories Co-Evolve Across the Life Course among Older Adults

Objectives Cumulative advantage is a central concept in life course research. Prior research has primarily focused on one outcome domain, overlooking the possibility that cumulative advantage could extend into other domains–what we refer to as diffusion of cumulative advantage. We build on and extend cumulative inequality theory to conceptualize diffusion and apply it to wealth and health, two domains ...

Does Having Daughters Affect Political Preferences? Using Meta-Analytic Tools on Many Surveys

This study investigates whether having daughters impacts political preferences and whether this effect varies across European countries. We estimate effect sizes for 39 countries in the European Social Survey (n = 156,236) and aggregate estimates using random-effects meta-analysis, following a preregistered analysis plan. We find significant evidence that having daughters increases the preference for ...

Occupations, Disability Insurance, and Career Choices

Work-limiting disabilities pose a significant risk to the earnings potential and welfare of older workers. While coverage of public disability insurance (DI) systems is almost universal, the risk of becoming dependent on DI varies across occupations. In this paper, I study the value of public DI across different occupations using data from administrative social security records in Germany. I...

Personality in the Classroom: Interactions of Parental SES and Students’ Big Five in Predicting School Performance

While socioeconomic status (SES) and personality have both been identified as relevant predictors of academic achievement, little is known about their possible interplay in predicting school performance. The present study used the latent moderated structural equations (LMS) method to investigate latent interactions between familial SES and parent-rated Big Five in a sample of German high school students ...

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 ...

Consolidated Trajectories? Social Class and Earnings Growth over the Life Course

What kind of earnings mobility regime defines our society? Are individuals’ earnings trajectories primarily shaped by their social class position, or do trajectories vary within them? These unresolved questions lie at the heart of debates on social class and labor market rewards. To address them, we leverage employment relations theory and data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. We use mixed effects ...

The Politics of Unjust Inequalities: From Injustice Perceptions to Protest and Redistribution

Collecting Longitudinal Data among Newly Arriving Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Germany: Experiences from A Pilot Study at the Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic