SOEP Research: Inequality and Mobility

Perceptions of Inequalities and Justice in Europe (PIJE)

Over recent decades, European societies have witnessed increasing social inequalities. Faced with more flexible labor markets, open trade, and technological as well as ongoing demographic changes, European welfare models have been unable to effectively address this issue. Recent developments such as the yellow vest movement in France and the rise of populist parties across Europe have renewed...

Wealth-Holders at the Top (WATT): An Interdisciplinary Research Network

How much do Germany’s top wealth holders own in assets? What are their socio-demographic and psychological characteristics? How do the rich get rich in the first place? And how involved are they in civic and political activities? The project Wealth-Holders at the Top (WATT) seeks to answer these key questions. The aim is to understand the extent, causes, and consequences of economic inequalities....

The Rising Longevity Gap by Lifetime Earnings: Distributional Implications for the Pension System

This study uses German social security records to provide novel evidence on cohort trends of the heterogeneity in life expectancy by lifetime earnings and, additionally, documents the distributional implications of this earnings-related heterogeneity. We find a strong association between lifetime earnings and life expectancy at age 65 and show that the longevity gap is increasing across cohorts. For ...

Covid-19: A Crisis of the Female Self-Employed

We investigate how the economic consequences of the pandemic, and of the government-mandated measures to contain its spread, affected the self-employed relative to employed individuals in Germany and, secondly, to what extent the female self-employed were more strongly hit than their male counterparts. For our analysis, we use representative real-time survey data in which respondents were asked about ...

Gender Bias in Justice of Earnings and Gender of Supervisor. Evidence from a Factorial Survey Experiment

There are persisting wage inequalities between men and women. These gender differences in wages are also reflected in gender differences in the justice evaluation of earnings. Women – even though structurally disadvantaged – evaluate their own wages more positively (“contented female worker paradox”) and at the same time both men and women show a...

Internet Use and Job Matching in Germany

We here assess the impact of DSL internet access on a set of labour market outcomes of working-age individuals in Germany between 2008 and 2012. Assuming internet access improves the quality of employer-employee matching by reducing search costs, we focus on indicators of job quality: the working hours mismatch, job satisfaction, and the probability of changing job. We draw...

Wealth Inequalities

Mortality by Education, Occupational Class and Income in Finland in the 1990s and 2000s

Differences in mortality by socio-economic position (SEP) are well established, but there is uncertainty as to which dimension of SEP is most important in what context. This study compares the relationship between three SEP dimensions and mortality in Finland, during the periods 1990–97 and 2000–07, and to existing results for Sweden. We use an 11% random sample from the Finnish population with information ...

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

We investigate how the economic consequences of the pandemic, and of the government-mandated measures to contain its spread, affected the self-employed relative to employed individuals in Germany and, secondly, to what extent the female self-employed were more strongly hit than their male counterparts. For our analysis, we use representative, real-time survey data where respondents are asked about ...

Life-course Income Dynamics (LINDY)

Concerns about inequality and questions of social justice and cohesion have re-entered the public arena and animate debate, provoked by the recent rapid increases in cross-sectional inequality. While much has been learnt from the literature on inequality, Deaton (2015) has outlined in his Nobel lecture several imperatives that are key to understanding inequalities and formulating welfare-enhancing...