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Refereed essays Web of Science
This paper examines whether biased income expectations due to overconfidence lead to higher levels of debt taking. We show suggestive evidence for a link between overconfidence and borrowing behavior in a representative survey of German households (German Socio-Economic Panel–Innovation Sample [GSOEP-IS]). This motivates a laboratory experiment to study causality behind these effects. In two experiments, ...
In:
Journal of Money, Credit and Banking
(2025), im Ersch. [online first: 2024-05-24]
| Antonia Grohmann, Lukas Menkhoff, Christoph Merkle, Renke Schmacker
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Refereed essays Web of Science
We evaluate German purchase subsidies for battery electric vehicles (BEVs) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) using data on new vehicle registrations in Germany dur¬ing 2015-2022. We account for confounding time trends and interacting EU-level CO2 standards using neighboring countries as a control group. We find that 40% of BEV and 25% of PHEV registrations were subsidy-induced. The program ...
In:
Environmental & Resource Economics
88 (2025),S. 185–223
| Peter Haan, Adrián Santonja, Aleksandar Zaklan
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Refereed essays Web of Science
By the end of the Second World War, an estimated 20% of the West German housing stock had been destroyed. Building on a theoretical life-cycle model, this paper examines the persistent consequences of the war for individual wealth across generations. As our empirical basis, we link a unique historical dataset on the levels of wartime destruction in 1739 West German cities with micro data on individual ...
In:
Journal of Economic Growth
(2025), im Ersch. [online first: 2024-05-17]
| Christoph Halbmeier, Carsten Schröder
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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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DIW Weekly Report 7/8 / 2025
Despite high inflation, the real gross hourly wages of employees grew by around 15 percent from 1995 to 2022. In particular, the lowest wage decile caught back up to all other deciles following a sharp drop in real wages. At the same time, the low-wage sector has shrunk by nearly five percentage points since 2007, and by even more in the east of Germany (14 percent). In 2022, 18.5 percent of employees ...
2025| Markus M. Grabka
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DIW Weekly Report 5/6 / 2025
Loneliness poses a serious health risk: Along with negatively impacting life quality, it can even shorten the life span. This Weekly Report investigates loneliness in Germany using Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) data from 2021 on loneliness. The analyses highlight the prevalence of three facets of loneliness (aloneness, isolation, exclusion) as well as regional differences and high-risk groups. The results ...
2025| Theresa Entringer, Linda Kumrow, Barbara Stacherl
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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
We study the dynamics of capital accumulation, income inequality, capital concentration, and voting up to 1914. Based on new panel data for Prussian regions, we re-evaluate the famous Revisionism Debate between orthodox Marxists and their critics. We show that changes in capital accumulation led to a rise in the capital share and income inequality, as predicted by orthodox Marxists. But against their ...
In:
The Review of Economics and Statistics
(2025), im Ersch. [online first: 2023-03-15]
| Charlotte Bartels, Felix Kersting, Nikolaus Wolf
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Research Project
As part of the ERC Consolidator Grant WEALTHTRAJECT, Philipp Lersch will break new ground in wealth research over the next five years, and further expand the range of high quality data collection by SOEP. WEALTHTRAJECT is the first project to comprehensively and systematically investigate diversity in long-term wealth trajectories within and between social groups.
The starting point of the...
Current Project| German Socio-Economic Panel study