Publikationen mit SOEP-Daten: SOEPlit

Wohlstand für alle? Die Entwicklung einkommensschwacher Haushalte seit 2005

Im Vergleich zu den frühen 1990er Jahren ist die Einkommensungleichheit zwischen Haushalten in Deutschland heute auf einem deutlich höheren Niveau und hat zu lebhaften Diskussionen über die Notwendigkeit ihrer Bekämpfung geführt. In dieser Debatte werden mittlerweile auch Stimmen laut, die betonen, dass die Einkommensungleichheit seit 2005 stabil geblieben ist. Dabei herrscht sowohl im politischen ...

The fundamental role of tax systems in the relationship between workfare and inequality in the lower half of the income distribution

In recent decades, many affluent democracies moved from traditional welfare states to workfare systems. Meanwhile, income inequality developed differently across countries, even when they made apparently similar shifts from welfare to workfare. It is a matter of debate why welfare state change had such heterogeneous consequences across countries. This article proposes that different incentives to take ...

Wer gewinnt? Wer verliert? Die Absicherung von Lebenseinkommen durch Familie und Staat

Disparities in labour market and income trends during the first year of the COVID-19 crisis: Evidence from Germany

Germany’s labour market has weathered the COVID-19 crisis quite well. The unemployment rate increased by less than one percentage point between the last pre-crisis quarter Q4 2019 and its peak in Q3 2020 (from 3.2% to 4.1%); the employment rate fell by less than five percentage points (from 75.7% to 71.1%). Both indicators have since returned to their pre-crisis levels (OECD, forthcoming[1]). The widespread ...

Exposure to Inequality May Cause Under-provision of Public Goods: Experimental Evidence

Economic inequality is rising globally and due to developments in information technologies and globalization, nowadays individuals are more exposed to such an inequality than ever. Recent studies show that exposure to inequality may shape economic decisions. In this article, we test whether contributions in the public goods game are sensitive to information about inequality of personal benefits between ...

Pandemic Depression: COVID-19 and the Mental Health of the Self-Employed

We investigate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on self-employed people’s mental health. Using representative longitudinal survey data from Germany, we reveal differential effects by gender: whereas self-employed women experienced a substantial deterioration in their mental health, self-employed men displayed no significant changes up to early 2021. Financial losses are important in explaining these ...

Environmental Behaviour and Decision Making - Evidence from Laboratory, Online and Natural Experiments

Tackling climate change and keeping global temperatures from rising by more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels is one of the major and most challenging issues that our societies are facing. Households are among the prime contributors to annual greenhouse gas emissions, with twenty percent of emissions being generated by residential energy consumption. Therefore, understanding individual decision-making ...

Lifetime Consequences of Lost Instructional Time in the classroom: Evidence from Shortened School Years

This study estimates the lifetime effects of lost instructional time in the classroom on labor market performance. For identification, I use historical shifts in the school year schedule in Germany, which substantially shortened the duration of the affected school years with no adjustments in the core curriculum. The lost in-school instruction was mainly compensated for by assigning additional homework. ...

Living longer, working longer: analysing time trends in working life expectancy in Germany from a health perspective between 2002 and 2018

Population ageing poses growing challenges to social security systems, in particular to public pension funds. The study analyses how Working Life Expectancy (WLE) and Healthy Working Life Expectancy (HWLE) in terms of three health indicators developed in Germany. Based on the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) from 2002 to 2018 (n = 211,141), time trends in labour force rates, mental and physical ...

Historical and cross-country differences in life satisfaction across retirement in Germany and Switzerland from 2000-2019

Objectives. Recent trends such as changes in pension systems or cohort differences in individual resources have altered the face of retirement transitions. Little is known about how these trends affected older people’s life satisfaction around retirement age in the past decades. Here, we investigated how levels and changes in life satisfaction before and after retirement changed with historical time ...