SOEP Research: Inequality and Mobility

Gender and Changes in Household Wealth after the Dissolution of Marriage and Cohabitation in Germany

Objective: To document how changes in household wealth following the dissolution of marriage and cohabitation differ by gender in Germany.Background: Marital property regimes usually prescribe that both partners receive a share of the couple's wealth following a divorce. The dissolution of cohabiting unions is not governed by marital property regimes in most countries, including Germany. Because men, ...

Parental Separation during Childhood and Adult Children’s Wealth

This study examines the association between parental separations during childhood and economic wealth of adult children. We provide a new test of this relationship and address two unresolved debates in the literature concerning (1) the pathways linking parental separation and adult children’s wealth and (2) the relevance of the timing of exposure. We use data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics ...

Culture, Children and Couple Gender Inequality

This paper examines how culture determines within-couple gender inequality. Exploiting the setting of Germany's division and reunification, I compare child penalties of couples socialised in a more gender-egalitarian culture to those in a gender-traditional culture. The long-run penalty on the female income share is 30.9% in West German couples, compared to 18.3% in East German...

Distributional Impacts of Carbon Pricing: A Meta-Analysis

Understanding the distributional impacts of market-based climate policies is crucial to design economically efficient climate change mitigation policies that are socially acceptable and avoid adverse impacts on the poor. Empirical studies that examine the distributional impacts of carbon pricing and fossil fuel subsidy reforms in different countries arrive at ambiguous results. To systematically determine ...

Gendered Employment Trajectories and Individual Wealth at Older Ages in Eastern and Western Germany

This study examines the association between employment trajectories and retired men’s and women’s individual wealth at older ages in the two distinct welfare state contexts of Eastern and Western Germany. Because of the increasing re-marketization of retirement provisions, wealth is becoming increasingly important for retirees’ economic well-being. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study ...

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 ...

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 ...

How Often Have You Felt Disadvantaged? Explaining Perceived Discrimination

Im Rahmen einer Längsschnittanalyse des sozio-oekonomischen Panels gehen wir der Frage nach, wie sich Diskriminierungswahrnehmungen von Einwanderern und ihren Nachkommen im Laufe des Integrationsprozesses verändern. Insgesamt betrachtet fühlen sich Migrantinnen und Migranten, deren Integration weiter fortgeschritten ist, seltener aufgrund ihrer Herkunft benachteiligt. Allerdings zeigen gruppenspezifische ...

Parental Leave and Discrimination on the Labor Market

COVID-19: a Crisis of the Female Self-Employed

We investigate how the economic consequences of the pandemic and the government-mandated measures to contain its spread affect the self-employed — particularly women — in Germany. For our analysis, we use representative, real-time survey data in which respondents were asked about their situation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings indicate that among the self-employed, who generally face a higher ...