SOEP Research: Inequality and Mobility

Gleiche Erbchancen für Frauen und Männer? Zur geschlechtsspezifischen Bedeutung von Erbschaften für die Alterssicherung

In Deutschland bestehen ein Gender-Pay-Gap, ein Gender-Wealth-Gap und ein Gender-Pension-Gap zuungunsten von Frauen. Ziel dieses Beitrags ist erstens zu untersuchen, obzudem ein Gender-Inheritance-Gap vorliegt, also Männer und Frauen ungleiche Erbchancenhaben. Zweitens wird untersucht, ob Erbschaften für die Alterssicherung von Frauenund Männern gleichermaßen von Bedeutung sind. Datengrundlage ist ...

Wage Risk and Portfolio Choice: The Role of Correlated Returns

From standard portfolio-choice theory it is well-understood that background risk, overwhelmingly due to wage risk, is one of the central determinants of individuals’ portfolio composition: higher background risk reduces risky investments. However, if background risk is negatively correlated with financial market risk, higher background risk implies more risky investment. We quantify the influence of ...

German Social Cohesion Panel (SCP) of the Research Institute for Social Cohesion (RISC)

The Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) at DIW Berlin and the University of Bremen are working together to develop a household panel study on the topic of social cohesion. The survey is being conducted by the infas Institute for Applied Social Science under the name “Zusammenleben in Deutschland,” or “Living Together in Germany.” The University of Bremen is taking part in the project as a participant in...

Time Spent on School-Related Activities at Home During the Pandemic: A Longitudinal Analysis of Social Group Inequality among Secondary School Students

Substantial educational inequalities have been documented in Germany for decades. In this article, we examine whether educational inequalities among children have increased or remained the same since the school closures of spring 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our perspective is longitudinal: We compare the amount of time children in secondary schools spent on school-related activities at home ...

Groups put at Particular Risk by COVID 19 (GaPRisk)

The Covid-19 pandemic poses numerous societal challenges. We will examine how it affects distinct social and at-risk groups in Germany, what it implies for societal inequalities, and what role welfare state measures play. First, we will describe the situation of the population before and during the pandemic in the health and the socio-economic domain. In each domain, we will study a set of core...

Risky Asset Holdings during Covid-19 and Their Distributional Impact: Evidence from Germany

We present evidence from a repeated survey on risky asset holdings carried out on a representative sample of the German population six times between April and June 2020. Given the size of the Covid-19 shock, we find little evidence of portfolio rebalancing in April 2020. In May, however, individual investors started buying heavily, fueling market recovery. The cross-section shows large differences ...

Extending the Kitagawa–Oaxaca–Blinder Decomposition Approach to Panel Data

The Kitagawa–Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition approach has been widely used to attribute group-level differences in an outcome to differences in endowment, coefficients, and their interactions. The method has been implemented for Stata in the popular oaxaca command for cross-sectional analyses. In recent decades, however, research questions have been more often focused on the decomposition of group-based ...

Pension Wealth and the Gender Wealth Gap

We examine the gender wealth gap with a focus on pension wealth and statutory pension rights. By taking into account employment characteristics of women and men, we are able and identify the extent to which the redistributive effect of pension rights reduces the gap. The empirical basis of this examination is the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), which is one of the few datasets where information on wealth ...

Panel Data in Research on Mobility and Migration: A Review of Recent Advances

Panel data has become the gold standard for causal assessments of complex human behaviour in quantitative social science. The objective of this review is to examine and discuss how panel data and related methods contribute to the identification of causal relationships in spatial mobility research. We illustrate this by providing a succinct overview of recent progress in spatial mobility research, drawing ...

Parental Leave and Discrimination on the Labor Market