SOEP Research: Inequality and Mobility

How to Measure and Proxy Permanent Income: Evidence from Germany and the U.S.

Permanent income (PI) is an enduring concept in the social sciences and is highly relevant to the study of inequality. Nevertheless, there has been insufficient progress in measuring PI. We calculate a novel measure of PI with the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). Advancing beyond prior approaches, we define PI as the logged average of 20+ years of post-tax ...

13th International German Socio-Economic Panel User Conference (SOEP 2018)

The 13th International German Socio-Economic Panel User Conference (SOEP2018) was held in Berlin, July 19-20, 2018 at Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (BBAW).The conference provides researchers who use the SOEP with the opportunity to present and discuss their work with other researchers familiar with SOEP data. Researchers of all disciplines (e.g., economics, demography, geography,...

Income Inequality in Germany

The Relation between Religiosity and Muslims' Social Integration: A Two-Wave Study of Recent Immigrants in Three European Countries

Does their degree of religiosity affect how successfully recent Muslim migrants integrate socially into the host society in terms of their social contacts with the majority population and their ethno-religious group? And/or do these co-ethnic and interethnic social contacts affect the religiosity of Muslim migrants over time? On the basis of a two-wave study among recent migrants in Germany, the Netherlands ...

The Short-Run Employment Effects of the German Minimum Wage Reform

We assess the short-term employment effects of the introduction of a national statutory minimum wage in Germany in 2015. For this purpose, we exploit variation in the regional treatment intensity, assuming that the stronger a minimum wage ‘bites’ into the regional wage distribution, the stronger the regional labour market will be affected. In contrast to previous studies, we construct two regional ...

A Novel Sampling Strategy for Surveying High-Worth Individuals - An Application Using the Socio-Economic Panel

High-worth individuals are typically underrepresented or completely missing in population surveys. The lack of a register-based sampling frame on high-worth individuals in many countries challenged previous attempts to sample high-worth individuals in voluntary scientific surveys. In a novel research design, we draw on register data on the shareholding structures of companies as a sampling frame. Our ...

Homeownership and Wealth in Switzerland and Germany

Property wealth represents the most important wealth component in nearly all OECD countries. Homeownership is linked to wealth accumulation in several ways: Wealthier households are more likely to buy a house or apartment, home owners tend to save more and rising house values typically yield higher returns than money in a bank account. Moreover, owners can borrow on a mortgage to finance, e.g., the ...

Linos-2 Workshop

As part of the DFG-funded project Strukturelle Bedingungen von Gerechtigkeitseinstellungen über den Lebensverlauf (for short LINOS for Legitimation of Inequalities over the Life-span), a workshop will take place on 13th and 14th of September, 2018 at the DIW premises. The workshop will focus on the first two waves of an employee panel, which is surveyed in the context of the LINOS project....

Minimum Wage Not yet for Everyone: On the Compensation of Eligible Workers before and after the Minimum Wage Reform from the Perspective of Employees

Calculations based on data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) show that after the introduction of a statutory minimum wage in Germany in January 2015, the wage growth of eligible employees with low wages accelerated significantly. Before the reform, the nominal growth in contractual hourly wages in the lowest decile, the bottom tenth of the pay distribution, was less than two percent in the long-term ...

Real Income Rose Significantly between 1991 and 2014 on Average – First Indication of Return to Increased Income Inequality

The real disposable income of private households in Germany, accounting for inflation, rose by 12 percent between 1991 and 2014. This is what the present study based on data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) has shown. However, the trends varied greatly depending on income group. While the middle income segment rose by more than eight percent, the highest income segment increased by up to 26 percent. ...