SOEP Research: Inequality and Mobility

How Do My Earnings Compare? Pay Referents and Just Earnings

Comparisons are crucial in shaping evaluations of one’s own position. Following this notion, we investigated the role of historical, financial, partner, occupational, and regional pay referents in predicting the just gross hourly earnings in a representative sample of German workers. Looking at this broad range of pay referents, we find that higher reference earnings were generally associated with ...

Parent-Child Mismatches in Educational Aspirations: Prevalence, Stability, and Convergence over Time

Parent-child mismatches in educational aspirations may negatively affect child development. We examine (1) the prevalence of mismatching aspirations across school grades 3–9 (ages 8–15), (2) their stability over time, and (3) whether mismatching aspirations converge to parents’ or to children’s aspirations. We use data from two German National Educational Panel Study cohorts (“kindergarten”: N=4,217, ...

Livestream: Social Mobility as a Key to Success for Economic Transformation and Reform

Social mobility and equal opportunity are key to thriving societies and economies. In the aftermath of the pandemic and in the context of increasing prices, calls for policymakers to address social and economic inequalities are intensifying. The recently launched Observatory on Social Mobility and Equal Opportunity not only brings together all OECD data points, but also displays the impact of...

(In)equality at the Workplace? Differences in Occupational Safety and Health Measures during the Covid-19 Pandemic and Related Employee Health

Auf Basis der Daten einer Sondererhebung des Sozio-oekonomischen Panels zur Covid-19-Pandemie (SOEP-CoV) werden in diesem Beitrag Unterschiede in der Umsetzung verschiedener personenbezogener und organisatorischer Arbeitsschutzmaßnahmen während der Covid-19-Pandemie sowie deren Zusammenhang mit der individuellen Gesundheit von Beschäftigten untersucht. Hierzu wird zunächst ein kurzer Abriss zu sozialen ...

The role of inherited wealth for wealth inequality in Germany

In this project, a top-corrected wealth distribution is estimated on the basis of the inheritance tax statistics and the SOEP. We analyze the concentration of wealth, the portfolios of the wealthy, the importance of inherited wealth, the gender inheritance gap and the gender wealth gap as well as reactions to inheritance taxation.

The Impact of Migration on Wages in Costa Rica

In recent years, Costa Rica has experienced greater international migration from neighboring countries due to political, economic, and social reasons, raising discussions on the impact of migration on wages of native Costa Rican workers. This article is the first that disentangles the impact of migration on wages for native Costa Ricans from the impact for settled immigrants by analyzing the effect ...

A Tale of Two Data Sets: Comparing German Administrative and Survey Data Using Wage Inequality as an Example

The IAB’s Sample of Integrated Labour Market Biographies (SIAB) and the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) are the two data sets most commonly used to analyze wage inequality in Germany. While the SIAB is based on administrative reports by employers to the social security system, the SOEP is a survey data set in which respondents self-report their wages. Both data sources have their specific advantages and ...

Basic Income - From Vision to Creeping Transformation of the Welfare State

Empirical Essays on Inequality

This dissertation consists of four empirical chapters which contribute to the fields of labor economics and inequality research. The first chapter examine whether gender differences exist in fairness evaluation of own earnings. Previous studies found that women tend to evaluate their own pay more favorably than men. Contented women are speculated to not seek higher wages, thus the ‘paradox of the contented ...

Routes to the Top

Who makes it to the top? We use the leading, socio-economic survey in Germany supplemented by extensive data on the rich to answer this question. We identify the key predictors for belonging to the top 1 percent of income, wealth, and both distributions jointly. Although we consider many, only a few traits matter: Entrepreneurship and self-employment in conjunction with a sizable inheritance of company ...