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Improving the Coverage of the Top-Wealth Population in the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)

We have developed and implemented a new sampling strategy to better represent very wealthy individuals in the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Our strategy is based on the empirical regularity that the very wealthy have at least part of their assets invested in businesses, and that businesses document shares of relevant shareholders in their books. Our results show that combined analysis of the ...

Verbesserung der Forschungsdateninfrastruktur im Bereich Hochvermögender mit dem Sozio-oekonomischen Panel (SOEP)

Im fünften Armuts- und Reichtumsbericht der Bundesregierung wurde darauf hingewiesen, dass die Datenlage im Bereich hoher Vermögen unzureichend sei (BMAS, 2017). Zur Verbesserung der Datenlage haben wir eine neue Sampling-Strategie entwickelt und im Feld implementiert. In der gezogenen Stichprobe sind Personen mit hohem Vermögen überrepräsentiert. Die neue Stichprobe wird entsprechend in das Sozio-oekonomische ...

Public Health Insurance and Entry into Self-Employment

We estimate the impact of a differential treatment of paid employees versus self-employed workers in a public health insurance system on the entry rate into entrepreneurship. In Germany, the public health insurance system is mandatory for most paid employees, but not for the self-employed, who usually buy private health insurance. Private health insurance contributions are relatively low for the young ...

SOEP-Core – 2019: Sampling, Nonresponse, and Weighting in the Sample P

Sonderauswertungen des Sozioökonomischen Panels (SOEP) 2020 und 2021 zu Löhnen und Arbeitszeiten in der Pandemie: Abschlussbericht

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 ...

The Beyondpareto Command for Optimal Extreme-Value Index Estimation

In this article, we introduce the command beyondpareto, which estimates the extreme-value index for distributions that are Pareto-like, that is, whose upper tails are regularly varying and eventually become Pareto. The estimation is based on rank-size regressions, and the threshold value for the upper-order statistics included in the final regression is determined optimally by minimizing the asymptotic ...

Risk Preference and Entrepreneurial Investment at the Top of the Wealth Distribution

This study quantifies the distributional effects of the minimum wage introduced in Germany in 2015. Using detailed Socio-Economic Panel survey data, we assess changes in the hourly wages, working hours, and monthly wages of employees who were entitled to be paid the minimum wage. We employ a difference-in-differences analysis, exploiting regional variation in the “bite” of the minimum wage. At the ...

Hours Risk and Wage Risk: Repercussions over the Life Cycle

We decompose earnings risk into contributions from hours and wage shocks. To distinguish between hours shocks, modeled as innovations to the marginal disutility of work, and labor supply reactions to wage shocks, we formulate a life-cycle model of consumption and labor supply. For estimation, we use data on married American men from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Permanent wage shocks explain ...

Bias in Tax Progressivity Estimates

Tax progressivity is central in public and political debates when questions of vertical equity are raised. Applied, structural research demands a simple way to capture it. A power function approximation delivers one parameter that captures the residual income elasticity - a summary measure of progressivity. This approximation is accurate, tractable, and interpretable, and hence immensely popular. The ...