SOEP Research: Inequality and Mobility

Irrational Attention to Correlation in Selected Data

It is very rare that the causal link between actions and outcomes can be observed directly. Often, it is much easier to observe correlation. To derive causality from correlation, economists use elaborate techniques. However, little is known about individuals’ capabilities to infer from correlational data in their everyday lives. I test if individuals erroneously infer...

The Variability of Occupational Attainment: How Prestige Trajectories Diversified within Birth Cohorts over the Twentieth Century

This study develops and applies a framework for analyzing variability in individuals’ occupational prestige trajectories and changes in average variability between birth cohorts. It extends previous literature focused on typical patterns of intragenerational mobility over the life course to more fully examine intracohort differentiation. Analyses are based on rich life course data for men and women ...

Internet Use and Job Matching in Germany

We here assess the impact of DSL internet access on a set of labour market outcomes of working-age individuals in Germany between 2008 and 2012. Assuming internet access improves the quality of employer-employee matching by reducing search costs, we focus on indicators of job quality: the working hours mismatch, job satisfaction, and the probability of changing job. We draw...

Wealth Inequalities

Gender Bias in Justice of Earnings and Gender of Supervisor. Evidence from a Factorial Survey Experiment

There are persisting wage inequalities between men and women. These gender differences in wages are also reflected in gender differences in the justice evaluation of earnings. Women – even though structurally disadvantaged – evaluate their own wages more positively (“contented female worker paradox”) and at the same time both men and women show a...

Mortality by Education, Occupational Class and Income in Finland in the 1990s and 2000s

Differences in mortality by socio-economic position (SEP) are well established, but there is uncertainty as to which dimension of SEP is most important in what context. This study compares the relationship between three SEP dimensions and mortality in Finland, during the periods 1990–97 and 2000–07, and to existing results for Sweden. We use an 11% random sample from the Finnish population with information ...

Life-course Income Dynamics (LINDY)

Concerns about inequality and questions of social justice and cohesion have re-entered the public arena and animate debate, provoked by the recent rapid increases in cross-sectional inequality. While much has been learnt from the literature on inequality, Deaton (2015) has outlined in his Nobel lecture several imperatives that are key to understanding inequalities and formulating welfare-enhancing...

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

We investigate how the economic consequences of the pandemic, and of the government-mandated measures to contain its spread, affected the self-employed relative to employed individuals in Germany and, secondly, to what extent the female self-employed were more strongly hit than their male counterparts. For our analysis, we use representative, real-time survey data where respondents are asked about ...

Interdependencies in Mothers' and Daughters' Work-Family Life Course Trajectories: Similar but Different?

Women’s life courses underwent substantial changes in the family and work domains in the second half of the twentieth century. The associated fundamental changes in opportunity structures and values challenged the importance of families of origin for individual life courses, but two research strands suggest enduring within-family reproduction of women’s family behavior and work outcomes. We revisit ...

The Accumulation of Wealth in Marriage: Over-Time Change and Within-Couple Inequalities

This study examines the accumulation of personal wealth of husbands and wives and investigates the development of within-couple wealth inequalities over time in marriage. Going beyond previous re- search that mostly studied the marriage wealth premium using household-level wealth data and that conceptualized marriage as an instantaneous transition with uniform consequences over time, we argue that ...