SOEP Research: Inequality and Mobility

Household Income and Wealth among People with a Migration Background: A Comparison of Switzerland and Germany

De-routinization of Jobs and Polarization of Earnings: Evidence from 35 Countries

The job polarization hypothesis suggests a U-shaped pattern of employment growth along the earnings/skill distribution, which is driven by simultaneous growth in the employment of high-skill/high-earnings and low-skill/low-earnings occupations due to Routine-Biased Technological Change (RBTC) [Acemoglu and Autor, 2011]. An aspect of both high social and political relevance is the implications of job ...

First Time Around: Local Conditions and Multi-dimensional Integration of Refugees

We study the causal effect of local labor market conditions and attitudes towards immigrants at the time of arrival on refugees’ multi-dimensional integration outcomes (economic, linguistic, navigational, political, psychological, and social). Using a unique dataset on refugees, we leverage a centralized allocation policy in Germany where refugees were exogenously assigned to live in specific counties. ...

Cohort Changes in the Level and Dispersion of Gender Ideology after German Reunification: Results from a Natural Experiment

Modernization theorists’ ‘rising tide hypothesis’ predicted the continuous spread of egalitarian gender ideologies across the globe. We revisit this assumption by studying reunified Germany, a country that did not follow a strict modernization pathway. The socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR) actively fostered female employment and systematically promoted egalitarian ideologies before reunification ...

The Long-Term Effects of World War II Destruction on Private Wealth in Germany

The physical destructions, expropriations, resettlements, and interruptions of international trade during Second World War caused a sharp reduction of wealth levels and inequality in many countries (Piketty, 2014). In Germany, an estimated 20 percent of the West German housing stock was destroyed. This paper assesses whether the effects of this destruction are measurable in the...

Real Incomes Increasing, Low-Income Rate Decreasing in Individual Age Groups

The number of employed persons in Germany has grown by over five million since 2000, in part due to an increase in immigration. This development is reflected in private household income, which has increased by 12 percent over the same period. Since 2013, all income groups have been benefiting from this increase and in 2015, the lowest income decile began benefiting as well. Disposable income inequality ...

New SOEP Research Project: What Are the Social Consequences of the Corona Pandemic?

What are the economic and social consequences of the corona pandemic for people in Germany, now and in the future? SOEP researchers are exploring this question together with researchers from the University of Bielefeld, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), Charité Berlin, and the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB Berlin) as part of the research project “Socio-Economic Factors in and Consequences ...

COVID-19 Is Not Affecting All Working People Equally

The corona pandemic and the political measures undertaken to contain it are changing the working conditions of many people in Germany. Based on data from the first tranche of a supplementary survey (SOEP-Cov) to the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), this study analyzes the effects of the corona crisis on Germany’s working population in 2019. In this paper, we investigate how severely people have ...

The Situation of Female Immigrants on the German Labour Market: A Multi-Perspective Approach

While general ethnic disadvantages are well documented, much less is known about coinciding disadvantages of ethnic origin and gender. Based on theoretical arguments of human capital theory, sociocultural approaches, labour market segmentation theory, and discrimination mechanisms, we investigate whether immigrant women experience more difficulties on the labour market than immigrant men, non-immigrant ...

The Impact of the German Minimum Wage on Individual Wages and Monthly Earnings

This paper evaluates the short-run impact of the introduction of a statutory minimum wage in Germany on the hourly wages and monthly earnings of workers targeted by the reform. We first provide detailed descriptive evidence of changes to the wage structure in particular at the bottom of the distribution and distinguish between trends for regularly employed and marginally employed workers. In the causal ...