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SOEP Brown Bag Seminar
Many couples face a trade-off between advancing one spouse’s career or the other’s. We study this trade-off using administrative data from Germany and Sweden. We first conduct an event-study analysis of couples moving across commuting zones and find that relocation increases men’s earnings more than women’s, with strikingly similar patterns in Germany and Sweden. Using a sample of mass layoff...
31.01.2025| Marie Paul, University of Duisburg-Essen
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DIW Weekly Report 3/4 / 2025
In 2024, the share of women on the top decision-making boards of the largest companies in Germany increased. A solid 19 percent of all executive board members at the 200 largest companies are now women, and almost 26 percent of members at the 40 largest listed companies are women. The financial sector is also catching up in this regard. Moreover, legal requirements, such as the inclusion requirement ...
2025| Virginia Sondergeld, Katharina Wrohlich, Anja Kirsch
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SOEPpapers 1217 / 2025
Men at the bottom quintile of the German male earnings distribution had lower average earnings in 2019 than in 2001. In contrast, female earnings have increased throughout the distribution. What explains these diverging trends and how did they translate into changes in net income? Data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) reveal that the drop in bottom male earnings is mostly due to a decrease in work ...
2025| Eliana Coschignano, Robin Jessen
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Refereed essays Web of Science
This study explores how gender and age interact in shaping beliefs about fair pay through a factorial survey experiment conducted with German employees. Respondents evaluated hypothetical worker descriptions varying in age, gender, and earnings. While no gender gap in fair earnings was found for the youngest hypothetical workers, a significant gap favoring men emerged with increasing age. This suggests ...
In:
The British Journal of Sociology
76 (2025),1, S. 180-187
| Jule Adriaans, Carsten Sauer, Katharina Wrohlich
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Refereed essays Web of Science
There is growing interest in understanding how gender influences the accumulation of wealth. While prior studies focused on labor-related determinants, our research focuses on inheritances and gifts. Using unique survey data that oversamples the top 1% of wealth holders in Germany, we show that the gender wealth gap is small for individuals up to age 40, then widens, and declines for those past retirement ...
In:
Economics Letters
246 (2025),111997, 5 S.
| Charlotte Bartels, Eva Sierminska, Carsten Schröder
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SOEP Brown Bag Seminar
Typically, poverty risk is assessed at the household level, neglecting within-couple income inequality and the role of individual characteristics in vulnerability to income poverty. This paper uses SOEP data and a quasi-experimental event study design to investigate poverty dynamics within couples over an 8-year period around the first birth. It follows partnered women (N=1,174) and men (N=1,137)...
13.11.2024| Christina Siegert, University of Vienna
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Cluster-Seminar Öffentliche Finanzen und Lebenslagen
The newspaper coverage of CEOs is highly gendered with more family-related language used in newspaper articles on female than male company leaders. In a randomized online experiment, we ask whether this stereotypical representation affects readers' beliefs about CEO competence, firm performance, and resulting financial decision-making. We show participants articles consisting of elements from real...
23.10.2024| Lavinia Kinne and Virginia Sondergeld
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SOEP Brown Bag Seminar
In this paper we document trends in inequality in earnings and disposable household income for men and women in Germany from 2001 to 2019. We find that males at the lower half of the earnings distribution have lower earnings in 2019 than in 2001. In contrast, female earnings have increased throughout the distribution. Households and the welfare state has cushioned much---but not all---of the...
16.10.2024| Eliana Coschignano, RWI
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Infographic
17.07.2024
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Cluster-Seminar Öffentliche Finanzen und Lebenslagen
This paper analyses the impact of the modernization of the Swiss marital law in the 1980s on married women's labour force participation in Switzerland. The reform of the law comprised multiple measures to foster the equality between husband and wife within the marriage. The Swiss people voted on the reform in a referendum in 1985, accepting the new marital law. Hence at the time of the vote, it...
16.07.2024| Lea Weigand, University of Zurich