Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Institutions, parental selection, and locus of control

Locus of control, that is, people's perception of how much influence they have over their lives, is an important predictor for economic outcomes - earnings, health and education, to name a few. This article uses difference-in-differences analysis to investigate the importance of the institutional environment for the development of locus of control, using the fall of the Berlin Wall as exogenous ...

You don't know what you've got till it's gone! Unemployment and intertemporal changes in self-reported life satisfaction

This paper uses concurrently and - for the first time - retrospectively reported life satisfaction from the 1984 to 1987 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel to study the importance of different comparison standards for the empirical correlation of unemployment and subjective life satisfaction. It is found that unemployed individuals do not only report significantly lower concurrent satisfaction, ...

Does composition matter? Wage inequality and the demographic and educational structure of the labor force in Germany

This paper addresses the importance of compositional changes in the labor force for the development of the wage distribution. Demographic change and higher educational attainment imply a shift toward employees with more experience and/or better education. These groups are characterized by higher relative wages as well as higher within-group wage inequality. Mechanically, these compositional shifts ...

The evolution of income inequality in Germany and Switzerland since the turn of the millennium

This paper presents and compares trends in income inequality in Switzerland and Germany from 2000 to 2009 using harmonized data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and the Swiss Household Panel (SHP). Whereas in Germany inequality has increased substantially during this period, in Switzerland inequality in market incomes has increased only marginally and inequality in disposable incomes has decreased ...

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 (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, ...

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 ...

The Low-Wage Sector in Germany Is Larger Than Previously Assumed

The total number of dependent employees in Germany has increased by more than four million since the financial crisis. Part of this growth took place in the low-wage sector. Analyses based on data from the Socio-Economic Panel, which in 2017 for the first time include detailed information on secondary employment, show that there were around nine million low-wage employment contracts in Germany that ...

Household income distribution in Germany in the years 1984, 1989 and 1994 - An analysis using the German Socio-Economic Panel. Report for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)

Household income distribution in Germany with special distinction between working age and retirement age population - An analysis using the German Socio-Economic Panel in the years 1984, 1989 and 1994. Report for the OECD

How unification and immigration affected the German income distribution

The German economy is not only affected by unification of Germany but by a significant influx of immigrants from abroad and huge migration from East to West Germany around the date of unification. Data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (GSOEP) allows one to disentangle those effects by decomposition of the Theil I(0)-Index of inequality. In addition, the paper offers insights into the transition ...