Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Cross-National Comparison of Income and Wealth Status in Retirement: First Results From the Luxembourg Wealth Study (LWS)

This paper provides a first glance at the role of income and wealth in comparing economic security of older persons in the United States in cross-national perspective. We compare our elders to those in six other rich OECD countries (Canada, Finland, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and the United Kingdom). These countries have diverse social policy systems, with respect to both social insurance and public assistance; ...

To own or not to own? Household portfolios, demographics and institutions in a cross-national perspective

Using harmonized wealth data and a novel decomposition approach, we show that cohort effects exist in the income profiles of asset and debt portfolios for a sample of European countries, the U.S. and Canada. We find that younger households’ participation decisions in assets are more responsive to income than older households. Family structure plays a significant role in explaining cross-country differences ...

Examining the gender wealth gap in Germany

Economic research on the determinants of gender differences in economic outcomes particularly in income and consumption is well established. Extending these investigations to other outcomes such as wealth up till now has been limited due to lack of individual-level data. Using the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) we find a significant ‘raw’ gender wealth gap of 50,000€ for married partners. Decomposition ...

The Distribution of Assets and Debt

Family Gaps in Income: A Cross-National Comparison

Motherhood and Women's Earnings in Anglo-American, Continental, European, and Nordic Countries

Windfall gains and labour: evidence from the European household panel

We investigate whether workers adjust hours worked in response to windfall gains using data from the European Household Panel. The results suggest that a rise in unearned income has a negative (although small) effect on working hours. In particular, after receiving a windfall gain, individuals are more likely to drop out of the labour force and the effects become larger as the size of windfall increases. ...

Reconsidering the income‐health relationship using distributional regression

We reconsider the relationship between income and health taking a distributional perspective rather than one centered on conditional expectation. Using structured additive distributional regression, we find that the association between income and health is larger than generally estimated because aspects of the conditional health distribution that go beyond the expectation imply worse outcomes for those ...

Changing employment patterns of women in Germany: How do baby boomers differ from older cohorts? A comparison using sequence analysis

In the present study, we examine employment biographies of women using the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Specifically, we compare the cohort of the baby boomers (1956–1965) with two older cohorts (1936–1945 and 1946–1955) by carrying out sequence analyses to investigate changes in their employment careers. Based on the biography sequences, we consider four different clusters to identify typical ...

The double German transformation: Changing male employment patterns in East and West Germany

Before the 90s, men’s employment careers in East and West Germany were quite similar, despite their widely differing institutional settings. Before reunification, employment biographies were mainly dominated by full-time employment in both East and West. After 1989 the GDR was incorporated into the Federal Republic of Germany and almost all East German institutions were supplanted by adapted West German ...