Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Understanding the Gender Wealth Gap in Germany: Asset Value vs. Asset Ownership

This paper investigates the gender wealth gap among married and cohabiting couples in Germany, using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). It explores the gender wealth gap by investigating various components of wealth and ownership disparities among couples. On average, men possess 34% more wealth than women. This gap arises both from differences in extensive margin asset ownership and ...

Did Germany’s 1997 Anti-Marital Rape Law Improve Women’s Well-Being?

This study examines the causal impact of Germany’s 1997 anti-marital rape law on women’s wellbeing. Using representative panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and a difference-in-differences event study design, we compare married women, who are directly affected by the legal reform, with unmarried women, who act as the control group. We focus on three complementary measures of well-being: ...

Institutionalized bargaining power and the level and distribution of wages: Collective wage agreements and union membership in West and East Germany

This paper investigates how workers’ institutionalized bargaining power, which extends in Germany beyond union membership to collective wage agreements, relates to the level and distribution of wages differently in East and West Germany. We conduct DFL and RIF decompositions as well as fixed-effect regression analysis on SOEP data from 2014 to 2023. We find that lower wage inequality is linked to collective ...

Immigration in the Age of Automation

This paper identifies endogenous automation as a novel transmission mechanism through which immigration shapes aggregate and distributional outcomes. We develop a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with four worker types distinguished by skill and nativity, search and matching frictions, and automation capital that substitutes for low-skilled labor. Applying this quantitative framework ...

The Locus of Control in Migrants’ Experience of Agency and Discrimination: A Mixed Methods Approach

Locus of control is a fruitful concept for analysing how individuals perceive and evaluate their migration histories, yet it remains underused in migration research. It offers a way to address central questions of agency and discrimination in migration processes without relying on ‘critical’ reductions such as ethnicisation or migrantisation, which pose well-known challenges for (trans)national research ...

Where is the Limit? Effects of Different Operationalisations of the Spatial System on Labour Market Research in Germany

Labor market entry dynamics and mental health outcomes among young people with and without disability

Young people with disability face significant barriers to stable employment. Yet, little is known about how early labor market experiences shape their long-term mental health. This study examines associations between early career insecurity and subsequent mental health trajectories, focusing on disability status as a key axis of inequality. We use nationally representative longitudinal data from the ...

Private wealth ownership and emissions

This paper estimates the distribution of wealth-related greenhouse gas emissions across the German population, assigning responsibility for emissions to the owners of different asset types. It combines macro-data on the emissions per asset type with micro-data on the asset ownership per individual in Germany in 2019, linking data from national accounts, air emission accounts, and survey data on wealth ...

Adapting to Adaptation? Income adaptation across the life cycle

This paper examines whether adaptation to income varies over the life cycle. Income and well-being research often distinguishes short-run and long-run income associations, but rarely asks whether the degree of adaptation itself depends on age. Using about three decades of data from the Socio-Economic Panel (1993–2023), we estimate individual fixed-effects distributed-lag models of life satisfaction ...

The price of hope: Reference-group mobility and the subjective value of income

We examine whether upward mobility within a person’s reference group changes the subjective value of own and reference income. Standard relative-income models interpret higher peer income mainly as status loss. We argue that this view is incomplete. In mobile reference groups, higher peer income may also signal attainable opportunities, consistent with a “tunnel effect”; at the same time, mobility ...