SOEP Research: Inequality and Mobility

Support for Everyone or Selection of Some? Self-Selection and Assignment Into a Large-Scale Refugee Mentoring Program in Germany

Mentoring has become a popular support strategy for recently arrived immigrants and refugees, offering access to valuable information and resources. However, little is known about selection processes into mentoring programs—who chooses to enrol, who receives support, and whether these patterns are systematic. Such selection affects not only program evaluations but also broader issues of refugee integration ...

Dealing with Censored Earnings in Register Data

Earnings are often top-coded (right-censored) in administrative registers. The censoring threshold in the case of Germany is the limit value for social security contributions, leading to a substantial fraction of censoring: For example, about 12%of male workers inWest Germany are affected, rising to above 30% for highly educated prime-aged workers. This missing right tail of the earnings distribution ...

Cross-national Differences in Socioeconomic Achievement Inequality in Early Primary School: The Role of Parental Education and Income in Six Countries

This paper presents comparative information on the strength of the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and literacy skills at ages 6–8, drawing on data from France, Germany, Japan, Rotterdam (Netherlands), the United Kingdom, and the United States. We investigate whether the strength of the association between SES and literacy skills in early-to-mid childhood depends on the operationalization ...

The Politics of Unjust Inequalities: From Injustice Perceptions to Protest and Redistribution

Collecting Longitudinal Data among Newly Arriving Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Germany: Experiences from A Pilot Study at the Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Wealth Inequality among Families in a Changing Demographic Landscape: Evidence from Germany, 1988–2017

The role of demographic change for wealth inequality remains underexplored. This study analyzes how shifts in population aging, immigration, partnership status, educational attainment, and female labor force participation influenced wealth inequality in West Germany between 1988 and 2017, focusing on households with children. Our findings reveal that while overall wealth inequality remained stable, ...

Trends in Relative and Absolute Mobility of Homeownership in Europe

Homeownership has declined among younger generations in most European countries. A common assumption is that this trend is increasingly stratified by parental homeownership, due to worsening affordability and the growing importance of parental financial support. In this study, we show that this assumption does not hold for the average European. Using data from EU-SILC 2011 and 2019 across 27 European ...

Consolidated Trajectories? Social Class and Earnings Growth over the Life Course

What kind of earnings mobility regime defines our society? Are individuals’ earnings trajectories primarily shaped by their social class position, or do trajectories vary within them? These unresolved questions lie at the heart of debates on social class and labor market rewards. To address them, we leverage employment relations theory and data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. We use mixed effects ...

The Tied Movers’ Gender Earnings Gap

Job-related relocations are common. Standard economic models typically treat workers as isolated individuals, while most workers live and move as part of a couple. Using a dynamic event study with synthetic comparison groups and German data, we show that women within couples frequently become “tied movers”: following relocation, male partners experience substantial earnings gains (as both hourly wages ...

Revision and Cross-cultural Adaptation of the Human Values Scale for Self-completion Modes

Since its first round, the European Social Survey (ESS) has included a 21-item measure of ten basic human values shared across cultures, known as the Human Values Scale (HVS), developed by Shalom H. Schwartz. Recently, the scale has been revised to a new 20-item HVS with shorter, simpler items (usually only one sentence instead of two sentences per item in the past version) and introducing a single ...