Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Long-term Participation Tax Rates

Generous income support programs as provided by European welfare states have often been blamed to reduce work incentives for the lowskilled and to increase durations of unemployment. Standard studies measure work incentives based on annual income concepts. This paper analyzes work incentives inherent in the German tax-benefit system when extending the time horizon to three years (long-term). Participation ...

Top Incomes in Germany, 1871-2014

This study provides new evidence on top income shares in Germany from industrialization to the present. Income concentration was high in the nineteenth century, dropped sharply after WWI and during the hyperinflation years of the 1920s, then increased rapidly throughout the Nazi period beginning in the 1930s. Following the end of WWII, German top income shares returned to 1920s levels. The German pattern ...

Can Households and Welfare States Mitigate Rising Earnings Instability?

We compare the evolution of earnings instability in Germany and the United Kingdom, two countries which stand for different types of welfare states. Deploying data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), we estimate permanent and transitory variances of male income over the period 1984–2009 and 1991–2006, respectively. Studies in this literature generally ...

An integrated approach for a top-corrected income distribution

Household survey data provide a rich information set on income, household context and demographic variables, but tend to under report incomes at the very top of the distribution. Administrative data like tax records offer more precise information on top incomes, but at the expense of household context details and incomes of non-filers at the bottom of the distribution. We combine the benefits of the ...

Redistribution and Insurance in Welfare States around the World

Redistribution across individuals in a one-year-period framework is an empirically intensely studied question. However, a substantial share of annual redistribution might turn out to serve individual insurance in a longer perspective. In particular, public pensions, that smooth incomes over the life-cycle and are funded by high taxes, play an increasingly important role in welfare states with aging ...

Short- and long-term participation tax rates and their impact on labor supply

Generous income support programs as provided by European welfare states have often been blamed to hamper employment. This paper investigates the importance of incentives inherent in the tax-benefit system for the individual decision to take up work. Using German microdata over the period 1993–2010, we find that recent reforms in Germany increased work incentives at the extensive margin measured by ...

Development of Top Incomes in Germany Since 2001

What share of total income in Germany is owned by the country’s top income earners and how has this share developed over the past decade? Answers to these questions can be found both in representative survey data such as the longitudinal Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study and in administrative data on income taxation. After the statistics have been harmonized accordingly, it becomes clear there remain ...

Drivers of Participation Elasticities across Europe: Gender or Earner Role within the Household?

We compute participation tax rates across the EU and find that work disincentives inherent in tax-benefit systems largely depend on household composition and the individual's earner role within the household. We then estimate participation elasticities using an IV Group estimator that enables us to investigate the responsiveness of individuals to work incentives. We contribute to the literature ...

Children's Opportunities in Germany – An Application Using Multidimensional Measures

Single parents and unmarried couples are increasingly replacing the traditional nuclear family. This paper investigates if the greater variety in living arrangements contributes to increased resource disparities among children in Germany. Children in single parent families are disadvantaged in at least three dimensions decisive for their later achievements: material standard of living, parental education, ...

Wage Dispersion, Markets and Institutions: The Effects of the Boom in Education on the Wage Structure