Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

A Head-to-Head Comparison of Augmented Wealth in Germany and the United States

We examine the composition of augmented household wealth, the sum of net worth and pension wealth, in the United States and Germany. Pension wealth makes up a considerable portion of household wealth of about 48% in the United States and 61% in Germany. When pension wealth is included in household wealth, the Gini coefficient falls from 0.889 to 0.700 in the United States and from 0.755 to 0.508 in ...

The Joint Distribution of Net Worth and Pension Wealth in Germany

The research on wealth inequality has generally focused on real and financial assets, while giving little attention to pension wealth: the present value of future pension entitlements from public and company pension schemes. This is surprising given the important role pension plans play in guaranteeing material security and well-being for a majority of the population, and suggests that they should ...

Fiscal Equalization and Tax Enforcement

In many countries organized as federations, fiscal equalization schemes have been implemented to mitigate vertical or horizontal imbalances. Such schemes usually imply that the member states of the federation can only partly internalize (marginal) tax revenue before redistribution. Aside from the internalized marginal revenue, referred to as the marginal tax-back rate, the remainder is redistributed. ...

Effectiveness of early retirement disincentives: Individual welfare, distributional and fiscal implications

In aging societies, information on how to reform pension systems is essential to policy makers. This study scrutinizes effects of early retirement disincentives on retirement behavior, individual welfare, pensions and public budget. We employ administrative pension data and a detailed model of the German tax and social security system to estimate a structural dynamic retirement model. We find that ...

Parental Background Matters: Intergenerational Mobility and Assimilation of Italian Immigrants in Germany

We investigate the hypothesis of failed integration and low social mobility of immigrants. An intergenerational assimilation model is tested empirically on household survey data and validated against registry data provided by the Italian Embassy in Germany. Although we confirm substantial disparities between educational achievements of immigrants and natives, we find that the children of Italian immigrants ...

Child Care Choices in Western Germany Also Correlated with Mother’s Personality

The expansion of formal child care, particularly for children under the age of three, has resulted in more and more children from this age group attending day care facilities. This formal child care setting is frequently combined with care provided by grandparents or other individuals. The combination and number of child care settings made use of is influenced by a variety of socio-economic factors ...

Recent Developments in Intergenerational Mobility (Chapter 16)

Economists and social scientists have long been interested in intergenerational mobility, and documenting the persistence between parents and children's outcomes has been an active area of research. However, since Gary Solon's 1999 Chapter in the Handbook of Labor Economics, the literature has taken an interesting turn. In addition to focusing on obtaining precise estimates of correlations ...

International Evidence on Well-Being

Imitative Obesity and Relative Utility

If human beings care about their relative weight, a form of imitative obesity can emerge (in which people subconsciously keep up with the weight of the Joneses). Using Eurobarometer data on 29 countries, this paper provides cross-sectional evidence that overweight perceptions and dieting are influenced by a person's relative BMI, and longitudinal evidence from the German Socioeconomic Panel that ...

Rethinking the Relative Income Hypothesis

Income comparisons have been found to be important for individual health. However, the literature has so far looked solely at upward comparisons, disregarding the effects of comparisons with worse-off individuals. In this paper, I use a broad definition of relative income to test simultaneously for the effect of "upward" and "downward" income comparisons on health. Relative deprivation ...