Individuals with assets in the millions of euros have been underrepresented in population surveys and accordingly little has been known about them. As a result, the full extent of wealth concentration in Germany was unknown. To close the existing data gap, the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) integrated a special sample in which individuals with high assets are overrepresented. New calculations using this ...
2020| Carsten Schröder, Charlotte Bartels, Konstantin Göbler, Markus M. Grabka, Johannes König
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 ...
2023| Johannes König, Christian Schluter, Carsten Schröder
We present first evidence how individual risk preferences shape entrepreneurial investment among the very wealthy using novel survey data from the top of the wealth distribution, which have been added to the 2019 German Socio-economic Panel Study. The data include private wealth balance sheets, in particular the value of own private business assets, and a standard measure of risk tolerance. We find that ...
2021| Frank M. Fossen, Johannes König, Carsten Schröder
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 ...
2020| Carsten Schröder, Charlotte Bartels, Konstantin Göbler, Markus M. Grabka, Johannes König, Rainer Siegers, Sabine Zinn
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 ...
In:
Empirical Economics
66 (2024), S. 735–761
| Frank M. Fossen, Johannes König, Carsten Schröder
Very wealthy people influence political and societal processes by wielding their economic power through foundations, lobbying groups, media campaigns, as investors and employers. Because personality shapes goals, attitudes, and behaviour, it is important to understand the personality traits that characterize the rich. We used representative survey data to construct two large samples, one from the general ...
In:
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
9 (2022), 1, 12 S.
| Marius Leckelt, Johannes König, David Richter, Mitja D. Back, Carsten Schröder
High‐wealth individuals are typically underrepresented or completely missing in population surveys. The lack of comprehensive national registers on high‐wealth individuals in many countries challenged previous attempts to remedy this under‐representation. In a novel research design, we draw on public data on the shareholding structures of companies as a sampling frame. Our design builds on the empirical ...
In:
The Review of Income and Wealth
66 (2020), 4, S. 825-849
| Rainer Siegers, Charlotte Bartels, Martin Kroh, Carsten Schröder, Markus M. Grabka, Johannes König
In:
Klaus F. Zimmermann (Ed.) ,
Handbook of Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics
Berlin: Springer
S. 1-38
| Johannes König, Carsten Schröder, Edward N. Wolff