Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

The Rise of Precarious Employment in Germany

Long considered the classic coordinated market economy featuring employment security and relatively little employment precarity, the German labor market has undergone profound changes in recent decades. We assess the evidence for a rise in precarious employment in Germany from 1984 to 2013. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) through the Luxembourg Income Study, we examine low-wage ...

Paradoxes of social policy: Welfare transfers, relative poverty and redistribution preferences

Korpi and Palme’s (1998) classic “The Paradox of Redistribution and Strategies of Equality” claims that universal social policy better reduces poverty than social policies targeted at the poor. This article revisits Korpi and Palme’s classic, and in the process, explores and informs a set of enduring questions about social policy, politics, and social equality. Specifically, we investigate the relationships ...

Targeting, Universalism and Single Mother Poverty: A Multi-level Analysis Across 18 Affluent Democracies

We examine the influence of individual characteristics and targeted and universal social policy on single mother poverty with a multi-level analysis across 18 affluent democracies. Although single mothers are disproportionately poor in all countries, there is even more cross-national variation in single mother poverty than for poverty among the overall population. By far, the U.S. has the highest rate ...

Putting Poverty in Political Context: A Multi-Level Analysis of Working-Aged Poverty Across 18 Affluent Democracies

More than just Nickels and Dimes: A Cross-National Analysis of Working Poverty in Affluent Democracies

Despite its centrality to contemporary inequality, working poverty is often popularly discussed but rarely studied by sociologists. Using the Luxembourg Income Study, we analyze whether an individual is working poor across 18 affluent democracies circa 2000. We demonstrate that working poverty does not simply mirror overall poverty and that there is greater cross-national variation in working than ...

How to measure and proxy permanent income: evidence from Germany and the U.S

Permanent income (PI) is an enduring concept in the social sciences and is highly relevant to the study of inequality. Nevertheless, there has been insufficient progress in measuring PI. We calculate a novel measure of PI with the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). Advancing beyond prior approaches, we define PI as the logged average of 20+ years of post-tax ...

Nearly universal, but somewhat distinct: The feminization of poverty in affluent Western democracies, 1969-2000

Party to Inequality: Right Party Power and Income Inequality in Affluent Western Democracies

Much social science suggests that income inequality is a product of economic and demographic factors and recent work highlights the influence of Leftist politics in affluent Western democracies. But, prior research has neglected rightist politics. We examine the impact of cumulative right party power on three measures of income inequality in an unbalanced panel of 16 affluent Western democracies from ...

Terminal decline in well-being: The role of multi-indicator constellations of physical health and psychosocial correlates

Well-being is often relatively stable across adulthood and old age, but typically exhibits pronounced deteriorations and vast individual differences in the terminal phase of life. However, the factors contributing to these differences are not well understood. Using up to 25-year annual longitudinal data obtained from 4,404 now-deceased participants of the nationwide German Socio-Economic Panel Study ...

Measurement of Income Distribution in Supranational Entities: The Case of the European Union