SOEP Research: Inequality and Mobility

In Germany, Equal Opportunities Are Almost as Bad as in the US and Much Worse Than in Denmark: Nine Questions to Daniel Schnitzlein

Measuring Well-Being: W3 Indicators to Complement GDP

Plenty of people in Germany, including politicians and researchers, believe that gross domestic product (GDP) is an outdated indicator of a society's prosperity. Therefore, at the end of 2010, the German Bundestag, the federal parliament, established a study commission (Enquete Kommission) tasked with developing an alternative to GDP for measuring growth, wealth, and quality of life. This commission ...

Spillover Effects of Maternal Education on Child's Health and Health Behavior

This study investigates the effects of maternal education on child's health and health behavior. We draw on a rich German panel data set containing information about three generations. This allows instrumenting maternal education by the number of her siblings while conditioning on grandparental characteristics. The instrumental variables approach has not yet been used in the intergenerational context ...

Wealth Distribution within Couples and Financial Decision Making

While most studies on wealth inequality focus on the inequality between households, this paper examines the distribution of wealth within couples. For this purpose, we make use of unique individual level micro data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). In married and cohabiting couples, men have, on average, 33,000 Euro more net worth than women. We look at five different sets of factors (demographics, ...

Consolidating the Evidence on Income Mobility in the Western States of Germany and the U.S. from 1984-2006

The cross-national intragenerational income mobility literature assumes within-country mobility is invariant over the period measured. We argue that a great social transformation "German reunification"abruptly and permanently altered economic mobility. Using standard measures of mobility (with panel data for the western states of Germany and the U.S.) over the entire period 1984-2006, we find the ...

Country Case Study - Germany

Welfare-Related Health Inequality: Does the Choice of Measure Matter?

Using representative microdata from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), we show that the welfare measure choice has a substantial impact on the degree of welfare-related health inequality. To assess the sensitivity of welfare-related health inequality measures, we combine a unique set of income and wealth measures with different subjective, cardinalized, and (quasi-)objective health measures. ...

Statistical Matching of Administrative and Survey Data: An Application to Wealth Inequality Analysis

Using population representative survey data fromthe German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and administrative pension records from the Statutory Pension Insurance, the authors compare four statisticalmatching techniques to complement survey information on net worth with social security wealth (SSW) information from the administrative records. The unique properties of the linked. - data allow for a straight ...

Dealing with Incomplete Household Panel Data in Inequality Research

In trying to capture complete within-household heterogeneity, household panel surveys typically try to interview all adult household members. Following from this, such surveys tend to suffer from partial unit nonresponse (PUNR), that is, the nonresponse of at least one member of an otherwise participating household, most likely yielding an underestimation of aggregate household income. Using data from ...

Intergenerational Transmission of Cognitive and Noncognitive Skills