SOEP Research: Inequality and Mobility

The Roots of Inequality: Estimating Inequality of Opportunity from Regression Trees and Forests

Income Inequality and Risk Taking: The Impact of Social Comparison Information

In contrast to the assumptions of standard economic theory, recent experimental evi-dence shows that the income of peers has a systematic impact on observed degrees of risk aversion. This paper reports the findings of two experiments examining the impact of income inequality on risk preferences and whether the knowledge of inequality mediates the decisions. In Experiment 1, participants who were recruited ...

Changes in Gender Role Attitudes Following Couples’ Residential Relocations

Background: Residential relocations of couple households are associated with increases in objective gender inequality within families in paid and unpaid work. Little is known about how couples’ relocations affect subjective outcomes such as attitudes.Objective: We examine whether gender role attitudes change when families move residentially in Britain, empirically addressing potential explanations. ...

SOEP User Conference 2020 - cancelled

We regret to inform you that SOEP 2020 cannot take place this year. The call for papers on our SOEP2020 - 14th International German Socio-Economic Panel User Conference is online. Conference date: July 9-10, 2020, in Berlin! Please submit electronic versions of abstracts (up to 300 words) no later than JAN 31, 2020 to: soep2020@diw.de Researchers of all disciplines are invited to submit an abstract.The ...

A question of gender: How promotions affect earnings

Occupational positions can explain an important part of the differences in pay between men and women. However, a considerable Gender Pay Gap exists even within the same occupational position. In this paper, we aim at understanding the reason for the gap within occupational positions and, therefore, investigate whether promotions lead to the same effect on earnings growth for men and women....

A Comparison of Earnings Justice throughout Europe: Widespread Approval in Germany for Income Distribution According to Need and Equity

The present study compares the perceptions of fairness of national earned incomes between the populations of Germany and the rest of Europe based on recent data from the European Social Survey (ESS). The vast majority of European respondents consider very low gross earned incomes to be unjustly low. By contrast, very high incomes are less frequently considered too high in Germany than they are in the ...

Average Wage Gaps and Expected Wage Cuts - An Investigation of Selection Neglect Bias in Income Expectations

Economists spend much of their lives talking about and correcting for sample selection. Recent evidence from behavioral economics documents that participants in lab experiments don't account for selection effects when they interpret conditional distributions. This "selection neglect" can distort expectations in settings where individuals learn from comparisons with other people who differ in...

Wealth Changes and Their Impact on Subjective Well-Being

Besides income, wealth plays an important role for the economic situation as well as the satisfaction of persons. So far the relationship between income as a flow measure and subjective well-being (SWB) is widely described. However, research in the connection between wealth and subjective well-being is scarce. This is predominately due to a lack of adequate microdata. In this paper we make use of longitudinal ...

Top Incomes in Germany, 1871-2014

This study provides new evidence on top income shares in Germany from industrialization to the present. Income concentration was high in the nineteenth century, dropped sharply after WWI and during the hyperinflation years of the 1920s, then increased rapidly throughout the Nazi period beginning in the 1930s. Following the end of WWII, German top income shares returned to 1920s levels. The German pattern ...

Transitioning Towards More Equality? Wealth Gender Differences and the Changing Role of Explanatory Factors over Time

The objective of the study is to investigate the changing role of explanatory factors of wealth and the gender wealth gap in Germany over the period 2002-2012 using individuallevel microdata from the German Socio-Economic Panel. The authors apply distributional decomposition methods and focus on the role of changes in labor supply, permanent income, portfolio composition, and marital status in this ...