SOEP Research: Inequality and Mobility

The Justice of Earnings in Dual-Earner Households

The rise in female labor market participation and the growth of "atypical" employment arrangements has, over the last few decades, brought about a steadily decreasingpercentage of households in which the man is the sole breadwinner, and a rising percentage of dual-earner households. Against this backdrop, the present paper investigates the impact of household contexts in which the traditional male ...

Ungleiche Bildungschancen: welche Rolle spielen Underachievement und Persönlichkeitsstruktur?

Wealth Inequality on the Rise in Germany

Individual net wealth in Germany totaled an average of around 88,000 Euros at the beginning of 2007 which was about 10 percent higher than in 2002. Decisive for this development was an increase in monetary wealth as well as wealth from private insurance. In connection with the overall quite unequal division of wealth, the median i.e., the value which separates the richest 50 per cent of the population ...

Bringing Home the Money: Xenophobia and Remittances: The Case of Germany

The determinants of migrants' remittances are the subject of this study based on German SOEP data (2001-2006). In contrast to previous studies we analyze the motives for remittances not only for foreigners but also for the broader group of individuals with a personal migration background. Major findings are: First, concerns about xenophobia lead to higher remittances. Second, income and gender has ...

The Gender Earnings Gap inside a Russian Firm: First Evidence from Personnel Data - 1997 to 2002 ; Updated Version

Using unique personnel data from one Russian firm for the years 1997 to 2002 we study the size, development and determinants of the gender earnings gap in an internal labor market during late transition. The gap is sizable but declines strongly over the entire period. Gender earnings differentials are largest for production workers who constitute the largest employee group in the firm. Various decompositions ...

The Impact of Household Capital Income on Income Inequality: A Factor Decomposition Analysis for Great Britain, Germany and the USA

This paper analyses the contribution of capital income to income inequality in a cross-national comparison. Using micro-data from the Cross-National Equivalent File (CNEF) for three prominent panel studies, namely the BHPS for Great Britain, the SOEP for West Germany, and the PSID for the USA, a factor decomposition method described by Shorrocks (1982) is applied. The factor decomposition of disposable ...

The Impact of Household Capital Income on Income Inequality: A Factor Decomposition Analysis for Great Britain, Germany and the USA

Regional Income Stratification in Unified Germany Using a Gini Decomposition Approach

Using representative micro data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), this paper delivers new insights into the development of income inequality and regional stratification in Germany after unification. This paper applies a new method for detecting social stratification by a decomposition of the Gini index that yields the obligatory between- and within-group components as well as an 'overlapping' ...

Redistributive Impacts of Government and Private Household Activities: Trends in Equivalized Household Net Incomes and Intra-household Earnings in Germany, 1985-2005

Examining the Gender Wealth Gap in Germany

Welfare-oriented analyses of economic outcome measures such as income and wealth generally rest on the assumption of pooled and equally shared resources among all household members. Yet the lack of individual-level data hampers the distribution of income and wealth within the ousehold context. Based on unique individual-level wealth data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), this paper challenges ...