SOEP Research: Inequality and Mobility

The Roots of Inequality: Estimating Inequality of Opportunity from Regression Trees and Forests

Transitioning Towards More Equality? Wealth Gender Differences and the Changing Role of Explanatory Factors over Time

The objective of the study is to investigate the changing role of explanatory factors of wealth and the gender wealth gap in Germany over the period 2002-2012 using individuallevel microdata from the German Socio-Economic Panel. The authors apply distributional decomposition methods and focus on the role of changes in labor supply, permanent income, portfolio composition, and marital status in this ...

SOEP User Conference 2020 - Call for Papers is out

SAVE THE DATE: July 9-10, 2020, in Berlin! The call for papers on our SOEP2020 - 14th International German Socio-Economic Panel User Conference is online. Researchers of all disciplines are invited to submit an abstract.The theme of the conference and keynote speeches will be "Inequalities and Their Subjective Perceptions in a Changing World". More information on our conference website.

Wealth inequality in Germany, 1895-2017

(together with Thilo Albers (HU Berlin) und Moritz Schularick (Uni Bonn)) This paper provides the first long-run wealth inequality series for Germany. We combine wealth tax data, survey data, national accounts' household balance sheets, and lists of large wealth holders to study the accumulation and distribution of wealth in Germany from 1895 to 2017. We find that wealth concentration in...

Wage premia for skills: complementarity between cognitive and non-cognitive skills

Abstract:I present evidence on the association between individuals' cognitive abilities, personality traits, and earnings in Poland. I find that cognitive skills and certain personality traits are complements. In particular, I find that cognitive skills and emotional stability are complementary, with neurotic individuals having significantly lower returns to their cognitive skills....

Was Marx Right? Income Inequality, Market Concentration and Voting in late 19th Century Germany

The  recent  debate  on  the  causes  and  consequences  of  income  inequality shows striking similarity to the debate in many parts of Europe before 1914. Today and back then the focus was on the role of capital share and market concentration as a cause for rising inequality.  In this study we analyze the drivers and consequences of...

Do Demographics Prevent Consumption Aggregates from Reflecting Micro-Level Preferences?

Most simulated micro-founded macro models use solely consumer-demand aggregates in order to estimate preference parameters of a representative consumer, for use in policy evaluation. Focusing on dynamic models with time-separable preferences, we show that aggregation holds if, and only if, momentary utility functions fall in the Identical-Shape Harmonic Absolute-Risk Aversion (ISHARA) utility class, ...

In Germany, Younger, Better Educated Persons, and Lower Income Groups Are More Likely to Be in Favor of Unconditional Basic Income

by  Jule Adriaans, Stefan Liebig and Juergen Schupp Representative survey results have shown a stable approval rate for implementing unconditional basic income of between 45 and 52 percent in Germany since 2016/17. In European comparison, this approval rate is low. Younger, better educated persons, and those at risk of poverty support the concept of unconditional basic income in Germany. But ...

In Germany, Younger, Better Educated Persons, and Lower Income Groups Are More Likely to Be in Favor of Unconditional Basic Income

Representative survey results have shown a stable approval rate for implementing unconditional basic income of between 45 and 52 percent in Germany since 2016/17. In European comparison, this approval rate is low. Younger, better educated persons, and those at risk of poverty support the concept of unconditional basic income in Germany. But these demographics are not the only factors that correlate ...

An Integrated Approach for a Top-Corrected Income Distribution

Household survey data provide a rich information set on income, household context and demographic variables, but tend to underreport incomes at the very top of the distribution. Administrative data like tax records offer more precise information on top incomes, but at the expense of household context details and incomes of non-filers at the bottom of the distribution. We combine the benefits of the ...