SOEP Research: Inequality and Mobility

The Variability of Occupational Attainment: How Prestige Trajectories Diversified within Birth Cohorts over the Twentieth Century

This study develops and applies a framework for analyzing variability in individuals’ occupational prestige trajectories and changes in average variability between birth cohorts. It extends previous literature focused on typical patterns of intragenerational mobility over the life course to more fully examine intracohort differentiation. Analyses are based on rich life course data for men and women ...

Mentoring Programs Support the Integration of Refugees

Over a million people sought asylum in Germany between 2014 and 2016. During this time, many Germans began volunteering in various ways to help refugees and mentorship pro- grams in particular gained significance. As this report shows, participating in a mentorship program has a positive impact on refugees: They improve their language skills and become more socially active. Mentors experience the relationship ...

Long-Term Effects of Equal Sharing: Evidence from Inheritance Rules for Land

What are the long-term economic effects of a more equal distribution of wealth? We exploit variation in historical inheritance rules for land traversing political, linguistic, geological, and religious borders in Germany. In some German areas, inherited land was to be shared or divided equally among children, while in others land was ruled to be indivisible. Using a geographic regression...

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...