SOEP Research: Inequality and Mobility

Pathways between Socioeconomic Status and Health: Does Health Selection or Social Causation Dominate in Europe?

Health differences which correspond to socioeconomic status (SES) can be attributed to three causal mechanisms: SES affects health (social causation), health affects SES (health selection), and common background factors influence both SES and health (indirect selection). Using retrospective survey data from 10 European countries (SHARELIFE, n = 20,227) and structural equation models in a cross-lagged ...

Inequality in Germany: decrease in gap for gross hourly wages since 2014, but monthly and annual wages remain on plateau

Despite the booming German labor market, wage inequality is still a relevant issue. In the present study, the authors report on the changes in wages and their distribution between 1992 and 2016. In addition to real contractual gross hourly wages, we closely examined gross monthly and annual wages. Based on Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) data, the results show that wage inequality rose significantly between ...

Inequality in Germany: Decrease in Gap for Gross Hourly Wages since 2014, but Monthly and Annual Wages Remain on Plateau

Despite the booming German labor market, wage inequality is still a relevant issue. In the present study, the authors report on the changes in wages and their distribution between 1992 and 2016. In addition to real contractual gross hourly wages, we closely examined gross monthly and annual wages. Based on Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) data, the results show that wage inequality rose significantly between ...

13th International German Socio-Economic Panel User Conference (SOEP 2018)

The 13th International German Socio-Economic Panel User Conference (SOEP2018) was held in Berlin, July 19-20, 2018 at Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (BBAW).The conference provides researchers who use the SOEP with the opportunity to present and discuss their work with other researchers familiar with SOEP data. Researchers of all disciplines (e.g., economics, demography, geography,...

Income Inequality in Germany

The Reciprocal Relationship between Material Factors and Health in the Life Course: Evidence from SHARE and ELSA

The widely established health differences between people with greater economic resources and those with fewer resources can be attributed to both social causation (material factors affecting health) and health selection (health affecting material wealth). Each of these pathways may have different intensities at different ages, because the sensitivity of health to a lack of material wealth and the degree ...

How to Measure and Proxy Permanent Income: Evidence from Germany and the U.S.

Permanent income (PI) is an enduring concept in the social sciences and is highly relevant to the study of inequality. Nevertheless, there has been insufficient progress in measuring PI. We calculate a novel measure of PI with the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). Advancing beyond prior approaches, we define PI as the logged average of 20+ years of post-tax ...

Gross income gap has increased since reunification

The top 10% of income earners in Germany earn almost as much as the middle 40% – the top 1%’s share of national income has increased from eight to 13 percent since 1995. The share of national income belonging to the top 1% of income earners has grown significantly in Germany since the mid-1990s, while the share earned by the bottom 50% has significantly decreased. These are the main findings ...

The Relation between Religiosity and Muslims' Social Integration: A Two-Wave Study of Recent Immigrants in Three European Countries

Does their degree of religiosity affect how successfully recent Muslim migrants integrate socially into the host society in terms of their social contacts with the majority population and their ethno-religious group? And/or do these co-ethnic and interethnic social contacts affect the religiosity of Muslim migrants over time? On the basis of a two-wave study among recent migrants in Germany, the Netherlands ...

Deindustrialisation and the Polarisation of Household Incomes: The Example of Urban Agglomerations in Germany

The tertiarisation, or perhaps more accurately, the deindustrialisation of the economy has left deep scars on cities. It is evident not only in the industrial wastelands and empty factory buildings, but also in the income and social structures of cities. Industrialisation, collective wage setting, and the welfare state led to a stark reduction in income differences over the course of the 20th century. ...