Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Old-age pension entitlements mitigate inequality - but concentration of wealth remains high

Entitlements from old-age pension schemes - statutory, company, and private - represent a considerable source of wealth. For data-related reasons, analyses of the personal wealth distribution have so far failed to take this into account, however. According to recent calculations based on the 2007 data of the German Socio- Economic Panel (SOEP), the present value of total pension and state annuity entitlements ...

Accounting for Imputed and Capital Income Flows

Using representative and consistent microdata from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) from 1985-2007, we illustrate that capital income (CI = return on financial investments) and imputed rent (IR = return on investments in owner-occupied housing) have become increasingly important sources of economic inequality in Germany over the last two decades. Whereas the operationalization of CI in ...

Public Pension Entitlements and the Distribution of Wealth

Economic Gains from Educational Transfers in Kind in Germany

The aim of this paper is to estimate non-monetary income advantages arising from publicly provided education and to analyze their impact on the income distribution and on economic inequality in Germany. Using representative micro-data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and taking into consideration regional and education-specific variation, the overall result is an expected leveling effect ...

Dealing with incomplete household panel data in inequality research

Population surveys around the world face the problem of declining cooperation and participation rates of respondents. Not only can item nonresponse and unit nonresponse impair important outcome measures for inequality research such as total household disposable income; there is also a further case of missingness confronting household panel surveys that potentially biases results. The approach commonly ...

The Impact of Home Production on Economic Inequality in Germany

Using representative income and time-use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we estimate non-monetary income advantages arising from home production and analyze their impact on economic inequality. As an alternative to existing measures, we propose a predicted wage approach that relaxes some of the strong assumptions underlying both the standard opportunity cost approach and the housekeeper ...

Representative Wealth Data for Germany from the German SOEP: The Impact of Methodological Decisions around Imputation and the Choice of the Aggregation Unit

Religious Heterogeneity and Fiscal Policy: Evidence from German Reunification

Theoretical work based on social identity theory predicts that population diversity undermines redistributive public policies. This article tests this proposition exploiting an exogenous shock in diversity due to Germany’s reunification. In contrast to previous work on ethno-linguistic or racial heterogeneity, we specifically analyze religious diversity, which is an increasingly relevant social cleavage ...

Spheres of trust: An empirical analysis of the foundations of particularised and generalised trust

While the literature on trust has produced various conceptual models, there is also some confusion concerning different types of trust and their formation. In this article, three contested points are empirically clarified. First, are there really different forms of trust as much of the literature suggests? Second, if so, then how are these different types of trust related to each other? Third, what ...

Distributional and Behavioral Effects of the Gender Wage Gap

The gender wage gap is a persistent labor market phenomenon. Most research focuses on the determinants of these wage differences. We contribute to this literature by exploring a different research question: if wages of women are systematically lower than male wages, what are the distributional consequences (disposable income) and what are the labor market effects (labor supply) of the wage gap? We ...