The German Socio-Economic Panel Study is a representative panel study for the German population, collecting data on a broad variety of topics of everyday life, including general well-being, household composition, educational aspirations and educational status, income and occupational biographies, leisure time activities, housing, health, political orientation and more. With its long-running panel structure, the breadth of topics and the representative nature of the data, the SOEP has become a central resource for quantitative research in the social sciences in Germany.

Honesty is perceived as fundamental to societal functioning, motivating education systems worldwide to enforce strict oversight and impose heavy penalties for dishonest behavior. Yet much academic misconduct remains unexposed, and its broader consequences are further obscured by the sorting of individuals into careers based on probity. Applying advanced plagiarism-detection algorithms to half a million publicly available graduate dissertations in China, we uncover previously hidden misconduct and validate it against incentivized measures of honesty. Linking plagiarism records to rich administrative data, we document four main findings. First, plagiarism is pervasive and predicts adverse political selection: plagiarists are more likely to enter and advance in the public sector. Second, plagiarists perform worse when holding power: focusing on the judiciary and exploiting quasi-random case assignments, we find that judges with plagiarism histories issue more preferential and lower-quality rulings ? effects muted by trial livestreaming. Third, plagiarizing judges generate spillovers to other judges and lawyers. Fourth, exploiting the staggered adoption of detection tools, we demonstrate that enforcing academic integrity leads to no change in political selection and modest improvements in subsequent professional conduct.

Who Pays When? The Intergenerational Incidence of the Green Transition

Graduates of fields that teach cultural and communicative skills are more likely to support green, alternative and libertarian parties. Hooghe, Marks, and Kamphorst (2024) argue that field shapes vote choice independently of education level. Their German evidence comes from the Socio-Economic Panel: enrollment in higher education raises support for the Greens, particularly in cultural and communicative fields. I reappraise and extend their German analysis with the same panel from 1984 to 2025. Their main finding holds with five additional years of data. Three results qualify it. First, their German and Dutch analyses score science differently. Scored consistently, the gap between fields shrinks by about two-fifths, while the overall effect of enrolment is unchanged. Second, the effect is not stable over time. It is large in the mid-1990s and in the 2020s and close to zero in the years between, a pattern that follows the rise of the Greens more closely than time spent studying. Third, field does not act independently of level. I compare university and vocational graduates in the same fields before and after their degree. Within two years of graduating, university graduates in cultural and communicative fields move toward the Greens and toward parties that are more liberal on culture and more open on immigration. Vocational graduates in the same fields do not, and they move the other way on immigration. How much a field matters among university graduates depends on how medicine is scored; the difference between university and vocational graduates in the same fields does not. The cultural content of a field moves party support when it comes with a university degree. For those trained in vocational training, the same content does not, so field and level belong in the same model.

We are pleased to invite submissions for our workshop taking place on November 26-27, 2026 at DIW Berlin.

The workshop is part of the SOEP-LEE2 project and brings together research on resilience, crisis responses, digital transformation, and cyber security, with a particular emphasis on empirical work using survey and linked data on firms, employees, and households. It will also showcase new data resources from the SOEP research infrastructure.

Economic crises, geopolitical tensions, and rapid technological change are profoundly transforming firms, labor markets, and households. At the same time, the diffusion of digital technologies, artificial intelligence, remote work, and cyber risks is reshaping organizational structures, work practices, and economic behavior. Understanding these developments requires high-quality data that links individuals, households, and organizations.

The program will feature three keynote lectures by leading international scholars in the fields of resilience, digital transformation, and organizational change: Christian Dustmann (Department of Economics, University College London and Rockwool Foundation Berlin), Osea Giuntella (Department of Economics, University of Pittsburgh) and David Peetz (Centre for Work, Organisation and Wellbeing, Griffith University, Brisbane).

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin) invite you to the launch of the new IMF's Departmental Paper "How Europe Can Improve Its Innovative Capacity"

Speakers will discuss Europe’s innovation gap in fast-growing technologies such as digital, biotech, and AI, and its implications for productivity and long-term growth. They will explore what holds back transformative innovation in Europe, including the barriers that prevent firms from scaling up successful ideas and make it harder to scale down unsuccessful ventures. The discussion will consider how deeper integration of product, capital, and labor markets, alongside policies that facilitate restructuring and scaling down, can strengthen innovation ecosystems, help resources flow toward the most productive firms, and ultimately boost Europe’s competitiveness and growth.
 

Well-designed industrial policies can help build innovation ecosystems in emerging sectors by providing enabling infrastructure, creating early demand, and overcoming coordination failures that often hinder new industries. By helping firms reach scale, they can accelerate innovation and competitiveness. Yet industrial policy is fraught with challenges. Political support often flows more easily to established industries with large workforces than to nascent sectors with greater long-term potential. Governments may struggle to identify the most promising technologies, and even more so to withdraw support when results fall short. Without national and international coordination, industrial policy can also trigger costly and inefficient subsidy races. The OECD has developed a framework for industrial policies that promote innovation, productivity, resilience, and competition while limiting market distortions and undue support for incumbents. Drawing on international experience, this panel explores how to design industrial policies that remain compatible with open markets, target high-potential technologies, and provide clear performance criteria for continued support. Experts will discuss strategic priorities, governance, implementation, evaluation, and the effective use of policy instruments to help new industries become globally competitive.

The event will be held in English.

REGISTRATION for your in-person or virtual participation.

Concluding with a light lunch and networking from 1:00 – 2:00 pm

As in some other countries, we observe diverging inequality trends in individual labor incomes and household disposable incomes in Germany starting in 2014. To understand these shifts, we decompose changes in the distribution of equivalized net incomes between 2014/15 and 2020/21 into the contributions of a comprehensive set of explanatory factors including population structure, employment, wages conditional on employment, capital income, public pensions and transfers, income taxes, and social security contributions. Our results suggest that, despite falling inequality in individual labor incomes, labor income gains disproportionately accrued to the upper part of the net household income distribution, where employment rates are higher. Increases in public pensions and transfers were concentrated in the lower part of the distribution, but were not sufficiently large to keep inequality constant. Other factors such as changes in population structure, capital income and the income tax schedule did not change inequality. Migration led to increases in inequality and poverty risk, but its contribution was modest. Public transfers increasingly contributed less to reducing net income inequality as rising labor incomes made households less reliant on them.

The Graduate Center of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin) and the Sustainable Economy Research group at CentraleSupélec are organizing a joint Winter School for PhD students and postdocs in Economics of Energy and Environment.

The distinguished, internationally renowned lecturers will be Prof. Frank A. Wolak (Stanford University), Prof. Veronika Grimm (TU Nürnberg), Prof. Philippe Quirion (CIRED-CNRS), and Prof. Afzal Siddiqui (Stockholm University). 

CODECHECK (https://codecheck.org.uk/) provides an approach for independent execution of computations underlying research articles. At one point during the publication process, one reviewer - the codechecker - certifies that they were able to execute relevant parts of a computational workflow. This certificate becomes part of the public record. With over 130 certificates contributed by over 60 codecheckers, the CODECHECK initiative demonstrates how a minimal reproduction positively influences the openness of research within the established publishing practices. At the same time, the project works towards a cultural change in academia to work more openly and to recognise more diverse research outputs and contributions, e.g., by contributing works and checks to Wikidata, by developing a plugin for journal platform for easier integration of CODECHECK, or by engaging early-career researchers and other experts in data or software in peer review. This talk presents the CODECHECK principles and workflow, showcases the Reproducible AGILE effort that changed how the GIScience community changed a conference, demonstrates institutional codechecking, and discusses how novel AI tools can meaningfully support reproducible research and reproductions.

We are pleased to announce that on December 18, 2026, DIW Berlin will host the “Macroeconometric Workshop”. The workshop brings together researchers working on both applied and theoretical macroeconometrics, featuring methodological and empirical contributions at the frontier of quantitative macroeconomics. It is organized with the support of DIW Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin, and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

We are delighted to welcome Evi Pappa (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid) as this year’s keynote speaker.

Alexander Nützenadel (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) and Jochen Streb (University of Mannheim) will present their book Contingent Expectations: Uncertainty, Risk, and Economic Behavior in Historical Perspective. More information about the program will follow.

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