We regret to inform you that due to the intensification of the COVID-19 epidemic in Europe we are pausing the preparations for the 14th SOEP User Conference 2020 (planned for July 9-10, 2020). We will notify all submitters by April 22, 2020 if the conference has to be postponed or even canceled.Thank you for your understanding, We apologise for any inconvenience. Please take care of yourself and
How much do Germany’s top wealth holders own in assets? What are their socio-demographic and psychological characteristics? How do the rich get rich in the first place? And how involved are they in civic and political activities? The project Wealth-Holders at the Top (WATT) seeks to answer these key questions. The aim is to understand the extent, causes, and consequences of economic
The original goal of the Finnish experiment of 2017 and 2018 was to try to get some evidence on how a new social policy instrument mimicking a basic income would work and what kind of behavioral consequences it would have. The realized experiment was restricted to people aged 25–58 already receiving a labor market subsidy or unemployment allowance and a total of 2,000 participants were
We here explore the link between individual concerns about crime and the distribution of income in Germany. We make use of 1995-2017 microdata from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) to show that both individual polarization and relative deprivation have statistically-significant effects on reported concerns about crime, while relative satisfaction plays no role. At the aggregate level, the
The gender pay gap increases with age: While the average gross hourly wage gap between male and female 30-year-olds is nine percent, the gap triples to 28 percent by the age of 50. This stark increase is due to differences in employment behavior in the decades between the ages of 30 and 50. Beginning at age 30, women often switch to part-time work to be able to provide childcare, whereas men tend
We examine the composition of augmented household wealth, the sum of net worth and pension wealth, in the United States and Germany. Pension wealth makes up a considerable portion of household wealth of about 48% in the United States and 61% in Germany. When pension wealth is included in household wealth, the Gini coefficient falls from 0.889 to 0.700 in the United States and from 0.755 to 0.508
This paper examines the dynamics of wealth and income inequality along the business cycle and assesses how they are related to fluctuations in the functional income distribution. In a panel estimation for OECD countries between 1970 and 2016 we find that on average income inequality - measured by the Gini coefficient - is countercyclical and also shows a significant association with the capital
Expanding public or publicly subsidized childcare has been a top social policy priority in many industrialized countries. It is supposed to increase fertility, promote children’s development and enhance mothers’ labor market attachment. In this paper, we analyze the causal effect of one of the largest expansions of subsidized childcare for children up to three years among industrialized countries
The (re-)introduction of rent regulation in the form of rent controls, tenant protection or supply rationing is back on the agenda of policymakers in light of rent inflation in many global cities. While rent control as social policy promises short-term relief, economists point to their negative long-run effects on new construction. This paper present long-run data on both rent regulation and
This study uses German social security records to provide novel evidence on cohort trends of the heterogeneity in life expectancy by lifetime earnings and, additionally, documents the distributional implications of this earnings-related heterogeneity. We find a strong association between lifetime earnings and life expectancy at age 65 and show that the longevity gap is increasing across cohorts.
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