SOEP Research: Inequality and Mobility

Low Level of Equal Opportunities in Germany: Family Background Shapes Individual Economic Success

For many years, securing equal life opportunities has been a normative goal shared by all democratic societies in the western world. Although, in principle, all citizens enjoy the same rights, in reality, individual life opportunities still vary according to family background which, in turn, shapes the prevailing pattern of social inequality. This is not a specifically German phenomenon. Based on a ...

In Germany, Equal Opportunities Are Almost as Bad as in the US and Much Worse Than in Denmark: Nine Questions to Daniel Schnitzlein

Measuring Well-Being: W3 Indicators to Complement GDP

Plenty of people in Germany, including politicians and researchers, believe that gross domestic product (GDP) is an outdated indicator of a society's prosperity. Therefore, at the end of 2010, the German Bundestag, the federal parliament, established a study commission (Enquete Kommission) tasked with developing an alternative to GDP for measuring growth, wealth, and quality of life. This commission ...

Country Case Study - Germany

Wealth Distribution within Couples and Financial Decision Making

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 (SOEP). In married and cohabiting couples, men have, on average, 33,000 Euro more net worth than women. We look at five different sets of factors (demographics, ...

Statistical Matching of Administrative and Survey Data: An Application to Wealth Inequality Analysis

Using population representative survey data fromthe German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and administrative pension records from the Statutory Pension Insurance, the authors compare four statisticalmatching techniques to complement survey information on net worth with social security wealth (SSW) information from the administrative records. The unique properties of the linked. - data allow for a straight ...

Nominal or Real? The Impact of Regional Price Levels on Satisfaction with Life

We study the effect of real versus nominal income on life satisfaction. According to economic theory real income, i.e., nominal income adjusted for purchasing power, should be the relevant source of life satisfaction. Previous work, however, has only studied the impact of nominal income. We use a novel data set comprising about 7 million data points that are used to construct a price level for each ...

Internalized Gender Stereotypes Vary across Socioeconomic Indicators

In the following we aim to approach the question of why, in most domains of professional and economic life, women are more vulnerable than men to becoming targets of prejudice and discrimination by proposing that one important cause of this inequality is the presence of gender stereotypes in many domains of society. We describe two approaches employed to measure gender stereotypes: An explicit questionnaire ...

Measuring Well-Being: W3 Indicators to Complement GDP

Numerous people in Germany, including politicians and researchers, believe that the gross domestic product (GDP) is an outdated indicator of a society's prosperity. Therefore, at the end of 2010, the German Bundestag, the federal parliament, established a study commission (Enquete-Kommission) tasked with developing an alternative to the GDP for measuring growth, prosperity, and quality of life. This ...

Consolidating the Evidence on Income Mobility in the Western States of Germany and the U.S. from 1984-2006

The cross-national intragenerational income mobility literature assumes within-country mobility is invariant over the period measured. We argue that a great social transformation "German reunification"abruptly and permanently altered economic mobility. Using standard measures of mobility (with panel data for the western states of Germany and the U.S.) over the entire period 1984-2006, we find the ...