SOEP Research: Inequality and Mobility

Inequality and Its Drivers in Germany, 1840-1914

Change in Personal Culture over the Life Course

Prior literature finds stability in personal culture, such as attitudes and values, in individuals’ life courses using short-running panel data. This work has concluded that lasting change in personal culture is rare after formative early years. This conclusion conflicts with a growing body of evidence for changes in personal culture after significant life course transitions, drawing on long-running ...

Entkoppelte Lebenswelten? Soziale Beziehungen und gesellschaftlicher Zusammenhalt in Deutschland - Erster Zusammenhaltsbericht des FGZ: Erster Zusammenhaltsbericht des FGZ

Mit dem vorliegenden Bericht eröffnen wir unsere Reihe der Zusammenhaltsberichte desFGZ. Die Zusammenhaltsberichte sollen auf der Grundlage der im FGZ erhobenen Dateneine interessierte Öffentlichkeit über zentrale Befunde und Analysen zum gesellschaftlichenZusammenhalt in Deutschland informieren. Mit dem Fokus auf Datenerhebungen ergänzendie am Forschungsdatenzentrum des FGZ (FDZ-FGZ) koordinierten ...

Wealth Creators or Inheritors? Unpacking the Gender Wealth Gap From Bottom to Top and Young to Old

This paper investigates the gender wealth gap using wealth recorded in the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Ranking women and men by their individual wealth reveals that the average gender wealth gap is driven by the large gap in the top tail. We find that the gender wealth gap widens during working age and closes during retirement. This is associated with men receiving higher inheritances and inter-vivos ...

The Long-Term Implications of Destruction During the Second World War on Private Wealth in Germany

By the end of the Second World War, an estimated 20 percent of the West German housing stock had been destroyed. Building on a theoretical lifecycle model of wealth accumulation, this paper examines the extent to which regional differences in destruction can explain differences in wealth today” – at the beginning of the 21st century. As our empirical basis, we link a unique historical dataset on the ...

Inequality of Opportunity in Wealth: Levels, Trends, and Drivers

While inequality of opportunity (IOp) in earnings is well studied, the literature on IOp in individual net wealth is scarce to non-existent. This is problematic because both theoretical and empirical evidence show that the position in the wealth and income distribution can significantly diverge. We measure ex-ante IOp in net wealth for Germany using data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Ex-ante ...

The Long Reach of Class Origin on Financial Investments and Net Worth

In this study, we argue that parents’ class position may influence the type and timing of their offspring's investments in financial assets. These investments may facilitate net worth accumulation beyond direct transfers, contributing to the intergenerational reproduction of social positions. We test these expectations using retrospective life history and prospective panel data for 14 countries from ...

First Time around: Local Conditions and Multi-dimensional Integration of Refugees

We study the effect of local unemployment and attitudes towards immigrants at the time of arrival on refugees’ multi-dimensional integration outcomes. We leverage a centralized allocation policy in Germany where refugees were centrally assigned to live in specific counties. To measure sentiments of native residents towards immigrants, we use geo-coded Twitter data, which provides our “negative sentiment ...

Routes to the Top

Who makes it to the top? We use the leading, socio-economic survey in Germany supplemented by extensive data on the rich to answer this question. We identify the key predictors for belonging to the top 1 percent of income, wealth, and both distributions jointly. Although we consider many, only a few traits matter: Entrepreneurship and self-employment in conjunction with a sizable inheritance of company ...

Empirical Essays on Inequality

This dissertation consists of four empirical chapters which contribute to the fields of labor economics and inequality research. The first chapter examine whether gender differences exist in fairness evaluation of own earnings. Previous studies found that women tend to evaluate their own pay more favorably than men. Contented women are speculated to not seek higher wages, thus the ‘paradox of the contented ...