Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

The Dynamics of Child Poverty: Britain and Germany Compared

We compare patterns of movements into and out of poverty by children in Britain and Western Germany using data from the British Household Panel Survey and the German Socio-Economic Panel for the period 1992-97. In Britain poverty persistence was greater, and poverty exit rates in particular were lower, than in Western Germany. In both countries, poverty was particularly persistent among children in ...

Using Household Panel Data to Understand the Intergenerational Transmission of Poverty

In Praise of Panel Surveys, a Sonder-Panel, and a Sonder-Panel-Papa

Trends in Income Inequality, Pro-Poor Income Growth and Income Mobility

Exercise and Life-Satisfactory-Fitness: Complementary Strategies in the Prevention and Rehabilitation of Illnesses

Which Feeling is Stronger: Jealousy or Laziness?

Why Has Income Inequality in Germany Increased from 2002 to 2011? A Behavioral Microsimulation Decomposition

This paper proposes a method to decompose changes in income inequality into the contributions of policy changes, wage rate changes, and population changes while considering labor supply reactions. Using data from the Socio‐Economic Panel (SOEP), this method is applied to decompose the increase in income inequality in Germany from 2002 to 2011, a period that saw tax reductions and a controversial overhaul ...

Optimal taxation under different concepts of justness

A common assumption in the optimal taxation literature is that the social planner maximizes a welfarist social welfare function with weights decreasing with income. However, high transfer withdrawal rates in many countries imply very low weights for the working poor in practice. We reconcile this puzzle by generalizing the optimal taxation framework by Saez (2002) to allow for alternatives to welfarism. ...

How Risk Averse and how Prudent are Workers?

Analogous to the widely studied concept of precautionary savings, our study contributes to the burgeoning literature on precautionary labor supply behavior when wages are subject to uninsurable wage risk. We estimate the parameters of a dynamic structural model of labor supply of men. We test whether workers are risk averse and prudent in the sense that they increase labor supply in anticipation of ...

How Important is Precautionary Labor Supply?

We quantify the importance of precautionary labour supply defined as the difference between hours supplied in the presence of risk and hours under perfect foresight. Using the German Socio-Economic Panel from 2001 to 2012, we estimate the effect of wage risk on labour supply and test for constrained adjustment of labour supply. We find that married men choose on average about 2.8% of their hours of ...