Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Measuring Well-Being: W3 Indicators to Complement GDP

Plenty of people in Germany, including politicians and researchers, believe that gross domestic product (GDP) is an outdated indicator of a society’s prosperity. Therefore, at the end of 2010, the German Bundestag, the federal parliament, established a study commission (Enquete Kommission) tasked with developing an alternative to GDP for measuring growth, wealth, and quality of life. This commission ...

The different roles of low-wage work in Germany: regional, demographical and temporal risk of low-paid workers

Editorial: From Panel Data to Longitudinal Analytical Designs: a Note on Contemporary Research Based on Data from the Socio Economic Panel Study (SOEP)

Constructing indices of multivariate polarization

Multivariate indices of polarization are constructed to measure effects of non-income attributes like wealth and education. Polarization is considered as the presence of groups which are internally homogeneous, externally heterogeneous, and of similar size. We propose a class of polarization indices which is built from measures of relative groups size and from decomposable indices of socio-economic ...

A Polarization Index for OVERLAPPING Groups

The well‐known index of income bipolarization proposed by Wolfson (1994) requires two groups to be split according to the median income and, therefore, to be non‐overlapping. The aim of this paper is to propose a new polarization index in the spirit of the Wolfson index. It allows for any possible partition of the population in two or more (also overlapping) groups. The new index maintains the simplicity ...

The Distribution of Income and Wages in the UK and West Germany, 1984-92

The first half of the report sheds some new light on the following questions with a detailed and consistent comparison of income distributions in Western Germany and the UK from 1984 to 1992. To what extent was the income distribution in Western Germany similar to the UK in 1984? Did the inequality of West German incomes rise to the same extent? What was the differing role of the labour market, the ...

Social Reporting and the Future of a United Germany

Household Division of Labor, Partnerships and Children: Evidence from Europe

U.S. and German youths: unemployment and the transition from school to work

The chips are down: The influence of family on children's trust formation

Understanding the formation of trust at the individual level is a key issue given the impact that it has been recognized to have on economic development. Theoretical work highlights the role of the transmission of values such as trust from parents to their children. Attempts to empirically measure the strength of this transmission relied so far on the cross-sectional regression of the trust of children ...