SOEP Research: Inequality and Mobility

Tax and Transfer System: Considerable Redistribution Mainly via Social Insurance

Overall monetary redistribution via the tax and transfer system leads to net incomes being much more evenly distributed in Germany than market income. As a result, in 2011, the Gini coefficient decreased from 0.5 for market income to 0.29 for household disposable income. The social security system has a significant share in total income redistribution by the government, making up more than half of ...

Evaluating the Minimum Wage Introduction in Germany (EVA-MIN)

Innovative Knowledge Transfer and Evidence-Based EvaluationHow the new minimum wage legislation, which goes into effect on January 1, 2015, is an open question. It is thus all the more important that the effects of the new minimum wage should be evaluated scientifically, for which this project will provide an important database. Researchers from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) research...

Income and Wealth Inequality after the Financial Crisis: The Case of Germany

The topic of rising income inequality does not only gain in relevance since the two prominent reports by the OECD (Growing unequal? Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries, Paris 2008; Divided we stand—Why inequality keeps rising, Paris 2011) but rather since the financial crisis. So far there is only scarce empirical evidence–besides a rather broad literature dealing with the US–about the ...

Wealth Distribution within Couples

While most studies on wealth inequality focus on the inequality between households, this paper examines the distribution of wealth within couples. For this purpose, we make use of unique individual level micro data from the German socio-economic panel study. In married and cohabiting couples men's net worth, on average, is 33,000euros higher than women's. We look at five different sets of factors (demographics, ...

Soziale Ungleichheiten der mütterlichen und kindlichen Gesundheit: Die Geburt aus dem Blickwinkel der Soziologie ; Dissertation

Inequality and the Time Structure of Earnings: Evidence from Germany

This paper studies the relationships between annual and subannual inequality and mobility during the course of the year. We apply an exact decomposition framework as outlined in Wodon and Yitzhaki (Econ Bull 4:1–8, 2003), and in Yitzhaki and Wodon (Research on Economic Inequality 12:179–199, 2004). Earnings records of pension insurants in Germany serve as the database. The long time horizon of our ...

Unfair Pay and Health

This paper investigates physiological responses to perceptions of unfair pay. We use an integrated approach exploiting complementarities between controlled lab and representative field data. In a simple principal-agent experiment agents produce revenue by working on a tedious task. Principals decide how this revenue is allocated between themselves and their agents. Throughout the experiment we record ...

Positional Income Concerns: Prevalence and Relationship with Personality and Economic Preferences

This paper presents detailed evidence about who compares to whom in terms of relative income. We rely on representative survey data on the importance of income comparisons vis-a-vis seven reference groups, allowing us to exploit within-subject heterogeneity. We explore the prevalence and determinants of positional income concerns, investigating the role of personality and economic preferences. Our ...

Private Net Worth in Eastern and Western Germany Only Converging Slowly

Very nearly 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, households in eastern Germany have an average net worth of 67,400 euros which is less than half that of their counterparts in western Germany with an average net worth of 153,200 euros. In both parts of the country, real estate ownership is quantitatively the most important asset type. Although the share of owner-occupiers has increased significantly ...

Wages in Eastern Germany Still Considered More Unjust Than in the West

Almost twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, far more eastern Germans are unhappy with their income than western Germans. In 2013, around 44 percent of employed eastern Germans rated their earnings as unjust compared with approximately one-third in western Germany. Although the east-west gap has been diminishing since 2005—to around 12 percent in 2013—this is not because eastern Germans ...