Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Top Incomes in Germany, 1871-2014

This study provides new evidence on top income shares in Germany from industrialization to the present. Income concentration was high in the nineteenth century, dropped sharply after WWI and during the hyperinflation years of the 1920s, then increased rapidly throughout the Nazi period beginning in the 1930s. Following the end of WWII, German top income shares returned to 1920s levels. The German pattern ...

Can Households and Welfare States Mitigate Rising Earnings Instability?

We compare the evolution of earnings instability in Germany and the United Kingdom, two countries which stand for different types of welfare states. Deploying data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), we estimate permanent and transitory variances of male income over the period 1984–2009 and 1991–2006, respectively. Studies in this literature generally ...

An integrated approach for a top-corrected income distribution

Household survey data provide a rich information set on income, household context and demographic variables, but tend to under report incomes at the very top of the distribution. Administrative data like tax records offer more precise information on top incomes, but at the expense of household context details and incomes of non-filers at the bottom of the distribution. We combine the benefits of the ...

Till death do us part: Transactions between losing one’s spouse and the Big Five personality traits

Objective: Although losing one’s spouse is one of the worst experiences that can occur in life, it has not been resolved yet how this experience relates to personality development. Method: In the German Socio-Economic Panel study (SOEP), information on the death of a spouse was assessed yearly from 1985 to 2017 and personality was measured repeatedly in 2005, 2009, 2013, and 2017 with the BFI-S. We ...

Bringing Income Distribution in From the Cold

Poverty in Europe

Is Rising Inequality Inevitable? A Critique of the Transatlantic Consensus

Developing Comparable Indicators for Monitoring Social Inclusion in the European Union

Income Inequality in OECD Countries: Data and Explanations

EUROMOD and the Development of EU Social Policy