SOEP Research: Inequality and Mobility

Einkommensungleichheit in Deutschland

To Marry or Not to Marry: Essays on Partnership Formation and Economic Labor Market Behavior of Married and Cohabiting Couples ; Dissertation

Die Wahl der Partnerschaft (Ehe oder eheähnliche Gemeinschaft) spielte bis in die 1970er Jahre eine eher untergeordnete Rolle in der ökonomischen Forschung. Der Grund hierfür ist die simple Tatsache, dass die Ehe die einzige anerkannte Form einer Partnerschaft war. Das Konstrukt der eheähnlichen Gemeinschaft spielte bis dato eine untergeordnete Rolleund wurde höchstens als Vorstufe der Ehe betrachtet. ...

European-Wide Inequality in Times of the Financial Crisis

In view of rising concerns over increasing inequality in the European Union since the financial crisis, this study provides an inequality decomposition of the overall European income distribution by country. The EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions are our empirical basis. Inequality has risen moderately within the core Euro area, particularly in the last two years of the observation period ...

Distributional Effects of Subsidizing Retirement Savings Accounts: Evidence from Germany

We empirically investigate the distributional consequences of the Riester scheme, the main private pension subsidization program in Germany. We find that 38% of the aggregate subsidy accrues to the top two deciles of the population, but only 7.3% to the bottom two. Nonetheless the Riester scheme is almost distributionally neutral when looking at standard inequality measures. This is due to two offsetting ...

Longitudinal Wealth Data and Multiple Imputation: An Evaluation Study

Statistical Analysis in surveys is generally facing missing data. In longitudinal studies for some missing values there might be past or future data points available. The question arises how to successfully transform this advantage into improvedimputation strategies. In a simulation study the authors compare six combinations of cross‐sectional and longitudinal imputation strategies for German wealth ...

European-Wide Inequality in Times of the Financial Crisis

In view of rising concerns over increasing inequality in the European Union since the financial crisis, this study provides an inequality decomposition of the overall European income distribution by country. The EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions are our empirical basis. Inequality has risen moderately within the core Euro area, particularly in the last two years of the observation period ...

Evaluating the Minimum Wage Introduction in Germany (EVA-MIN)

Innovative Knowledge Transfer and Evidence-Based EvaluationHow the new minimum wage legislation, which goes into effect on January 1, 2015, is an open question. It is thus all the more important that the effects of the new minimum wage should be evaluated scientifically, for which this project will provide an important database. Researchers from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) research...

Measuring Transnationality of Immigrants in Germany: Prevalence and Relationship with Social Inequalities

The scope of immigrants' transnational ties and the relationship to their social position is subject to a controversial debate that suggests a dualistic picture. On the one hand, globalization theorists argue that an elite of highly educated and economically most successful professionals intensively engages in and benefits from transnationality. On the other hand, most scholars in migration and assimilation ...

Tax and Transfer System: Considerable Redistribution Mainly via Social Insurance

Overall monetary redistribution via the tax and transfer system leads to net incomes being much more evenly distributed in Germany than market income. As a result, in 2011, the Gini coefficient decreased from 0.5 for market income to 0.29 for household disposable income. The social security system has a significant share in total income redistribution by the government, making up more than half of ...

Income and Wealth Inequality after the Financial Crisis: The Case of Germany

The topic of rising income inequality does not only gain in relevance since the two prominent reports by the OECD (Growing unequal? Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries, Paris 2008; Divided we stand—Why inequality keeps rising, Paris 2011) but rather since the financial crisis. So far there is only scarce empirical evidence–besides a rather broad literature dealing with the US–about the ...