SOEP Research: Inequality and Mobility

Comparing Wealth: Data Quality of the HFCS

The Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) provides information about household wealth (real and financial assets as well as liabilities) from 15 Euro‐countries after the financial crisis of 2007/8. The survey will be the central dataset in this topic in the future. However, several aspects point to potential methodological constraints regarding crosscountry comparability. Therefore the aim ...

Are We Architects of Our Own Happiness? The Importance of Family Background for Well-Being

This paper analyzes whether individuals have equal opportunity to achieve happiness (or wellbeing). We estimate sibling correlations and intergenerational correlations in self-reported life satisfaction, satisfaction with household income, job satisfaction, and satisfaction with health. We find high sibling correlations for all measures of well-being. The results suggest that family background explains, ...

A New Look at Intergenerational Mobility in Germany Compared to the US

Motivated by contradictory evidence on intergenerational mobility in Germany, I present a cross-country comparison of Germany and the US, reassessing the question of whether intergenerational mobility is higher in Germany than the US. I can reproduce the standard result from the literature, which states that the German intergenerational elasticity estimates are lower than those for the US. However, ...

Poor, Unemployed, and Politically Inactive?

Low income earners and job seekers are less interested and active in politics than people above the at-risk-of-poverty threshold and the working population. Compared to other European democracies, Germany has slightly above-average levels of inequality of political participation. Data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study suggest that this inequality has followed an upward trend over the last ...

Reduction in Income Inequality Faltering

Inequality of disposable incomes in Germany has decreased slightly since its peak in 2005. However, this trend did not continue in 2011. The most important reasons for this were the inequality in market incomes, including capital incomes, which had increased again. Besides this finding, the updated analyses of personal income distribution based on the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study show that the ...

Persistently High Wealth Inequality in Germany

According to current analyses based on the Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), the total net assets of German households in 2012 amounted to 6.3 trillion euros. Almost 28 percent of the adult population had no or even negative net wealth. On average, individual net assets in 2012 totaled over 83,000 euros, slightly more than ten years previously. The degree of wealth inequality also remained virtually ...

Unemployed Have Considerably Fewer Assets Than Ten Years Ago: Eight Questions to Markus M. Grabka

Fast Methods for Jackknifing Inequality Indices

The jackknife is a resampling method that uses subsets of the original database by leaving out one observation at a time from the sample. The paper develops fast algorithms for jackknifing inequality indices with only a few passes through the data. The number of passes is independent of the number of observations. Hence, the method provides an efficient way to obtain standard errors of the estimators ...

Poor, Unemployed, and Politically Inactive?

People with low incomes and job seekers are less interested and active in politics than people above the at-risk-of-poverty threshold and the working population. Compared to other European democracies, Germany has slightly above-average levels of inequality of political participation. Data from the Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) suggest that this inequality has followed an upward trend over the ...

The Poor and Unemployed Show Less Political Interest: Seven Questions to Martin Kroh