The affordability of housing has become a major topic of discussion in Germany among both social scientists and the public at large. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we provide rent-income ratios over more than two decades and show how they change with households’...

Research on wealth inequality usually focuses on real and financial assets, while pension wealth – the present value of future pension entitlements from public and company pension schemes – receives little attention. This is astonishing, given that pension plans play an important role for...

Well-being development at the end of life is often characterized by steep deteriorations, but individual differences in these terminal declines are substantial and not yet well understood. This study moved beyond the typical consideration of health predictors and explored the role of social...

Die vorliegende Studie befasst sich mit der Analyse der Stabilität der Lebenszufriedenheit, auf Basis der Paneldaten des sozio-oekonomischen Panels (SOEP). Benutzt wird das neuartige Konzept der longitudinalen Entropie und so können bereits in der Literatur vorliegende Analysen zur...

We provide levels of, compositions of, and inequalities in household augmented wealth - defined as the sum of net worth and pension wealth - for two countries: the United States and Germany. Pension wealth makes up a considerable portion of household wealth: about 48% in the United States and...

After the introduction in Section 2, we very briefly sketch out current theoretical and empirical developments in the social sciences. In our view, they all point in the same direction: toward the acute and increasing need for multidisciplinary longitudinal data covering a wide range of living...

Using a unique dataset we study both the actual and self-perceived relationship between subjective well-being and income comparisons against a wide range of potential comparison groups, enabling us to investigate a broader range of questions than in previous studies. In questions inserted into a...

The main aim of the present paper is to historically reappraise the development of the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) in the 1990s after the first six waves had been collected. This development was closely connected to the opening of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe and the fall of...

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...