SOEP Research: Inequality and Mobility

Time Spent on School-Related Activities at Home during the Pandemic: A Longitudinal Analysis of Social Group Inequality among Secondary School Students

Substantial educational inequalities have been documented in Germany for decades. In this article, we examine whether educational inequalities among children have increased or remained the same since the school closures of spring 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our perspective is longitudinal: We compare the amount of time children in secondary schools spent on school-related activities at home ...

Do You Really Want to Share Everything? The Wellbeing of Work-Linked Couples

Work as well as family life are crucial sources of human wellbeing, which however often interfere. This is especially so if partners work in the same occupation or industry. At the same time, being work-linked may benefit their career success. Still, surprisingly little is known about the wellbeing of work-linked couples. Our study fills this gap by examining the satisfaction differences between work-linked ...

Cracking under Pressure? Gender Role Attitudes toward Maternal Employment in Times of a Pandemic

This paper studies the effects of Covid-19 related daycare and school closures on gender role attitudes toward maternal employment in Germany. We compare women and men with dependent children to those without children one year after the outbreak of the pandemic. Using data on gender role attitudes from 2008 through 2021, we find that fathers' egalitarian attitudes toward maternal employment dropped ...

Expert Workshops Period 3

Redistribution and Insurance in Welfare States around the World

Redistribution across individuals within the framework of a one-year period is an empirically intensely studied question. However, a substantial share of annual redistribution might turn out to serve individual insurance in a longer perspective, reducing the level of actual redistribution across individuals. In this paper, we investigate to what extent long-run redistribution diverges from annual redistribution ...

What's in a Word? Just vs. Fair vs. Appropriate Earnings for Self and Others

Despite Rawls’ famous call to distinguish between justice and fairness, these and other justice-related words often seem to be used interchangeably by both ordinary people and justice researchers. Based on a survey-embedded question wording experiment (N = 4534) fielded in Germany as part of the GESIS Panel, we explore the effects of three justice words— “just,” “fair,” and “appropriate”—on the sense ...

Need for Long-Term Care Depends on Social Standing

The poor have a significantly shorter life expectancy than the wealthy. Using data from the Socio-Economic Panel, this Weekly Report shows that poorer people become in need of care earlier in life and more often. In addition, blue-collar workers have a higher risk of requiring care than civil servants, as do people with high job strain compared to those with low job strain. The risk of dependence on ...

A Gendered Look at Integration: The Employment of Immigrant Women and Men in Germany: Dissertation

Weltweit migrieren Männer und Frauen, ihre Arbeitsmarktintegration ist jedoch grundsätzlich verschieden. Erklärungen hierfür sind bislang unzureichend. Daher entwickelt diese Dissertation ein Konzept zu Migration, Geschlecht und Erwerbstätigkeit, dessen Kernargument ist, dass sich Geschlechterunterschiede über die Immigration reproduzieren. Die Papiere der Dissertation testen drei Mechanismen, die ...

Exposure to Inequality May Cause Under-provision of Public Goods: Experimental Evidence

Economic inequality is rising globally and due to developments in information technologies and globalization, nowadays individuals are more exposed to such an inequality than ever. Recent studies show that exposure to inequality may shape economic decisions. In this article, we test whether contributions in the public goods game are sensitive to information about inequality of personal benefits between ...

COVID-19: a Crisis of the Female Self-Employed

We investigate how the economic consequences of the pandemic and the government-mandated measures to contain its spread affect the self-employed — particularly women — in Germany. For our analysis, we use representative, real-time survey data in which respondents were asked about their situation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings indicate that among the self-employed, who generally face a higher ...