Projects
Research Projects
Employment Risks and the Quality of Work in the Digital Transformation: Using the SOEP for Empirical Analysis of AI, Platform Work, and Digital Work (DigiSOEP)
Funding: German Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs
Description:
The digital transformation is fundamentally changing the ways people and machines work together, creating profound connections between physical and virtual worlds. New communication channels are emerging—and with them, new possibilities for flexible work practices, locations, and hours. Digitalization opens up diverse opportunities for the working world and for society as a whole, but it also bears considerable risks. Researchers on the project are therefore pursuing the goals of:
Tracing how far digitalization has progressed, using special question modules from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) to analyze the prevalence of platform work, artificial intelligence, and digitalization in the workplace.
Producing interdisciplinary findings on two key topics in the social sciences: first, the Substitution and Growth of Employment in the Digital Workplace from the research in economics, and second, the Quality of Work and Social Inequality in the Digital Workplace from the research in sociology.
Conducting research in survey methodology to collect information on characteristics of digitalization from survey data and validate this information using existing data sources.
The project will provide a sound basis for evidence-based decisions on labor and social policy. By doing so, it will help to reduce the costs of the digital transformation and allow technological progress to benefit as many population groups as possible.
Life-Cycle Inequality Dynamics (LINDY)
Funding: ANR - Agence National de la Recherche and DFG - Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
Description:
Concerns about inequality and questions of social justice and cohesion have re-entered the public arena and animate debate, provoked by the recent rapid increases in cross-sectional inequality. While much has been learnt from the literature on inequality, Deaton (2015) has outlined in his Nobel lecture several imperatives that are key to understanding inequalities and formulating welfare-enhancing policies, namely that: (i) differences in resources across individuals should be measured not only at specific points in time but also across the life course; (ii) direct economic measures of well-being should be developed to assess better socio-economic outcomes; and (iii) data should be reconciled with lifecycle models to explain the causal mechanisms behind outcomes.
Our proposal is built on these imperatives, and brings together several coherently linked work packages (WPs) that focus, from a life-course perspective, on the causes of inequalities in and fluctuations of economic resources, most prominently income and wealth, and their implications for welfare and policy. Empirically, coherence is achieved by working with a common unique data source (SOEP-RV), housed at team member DIW, that combines information collected in the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) with record-linked administrative microdata from the statutory German pension system. It is unique in its recording of labor market events over entire life-courses including the retirement phase as provided in the administrative microdata, while adding the rich individual and household level data of the SOEP. Our team will be among the first to use SOEP-RV. Since today’s labor market performance affects pension entitlements (“augmented wealth”), our data permits extending the traditional life-cycle perspective beyond the retirement data (“extended life-cycle”).
Team: Mark Trede, Christian Schluter, Emmanuel Flachaire, Carsten Schroeder, Jan Luca Hennig
Wealth-Holders at the Top (WATT): An Interdisciplinary Research Network
Funding: DFG - Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
Description: How much do Germany’s top wealth holders own in assets? What are their socio-demographic and psychological characteristics? How do the rich get rich in the first place? And how involved are they in civic and political activities? The project Wealth-Holders at the Top (WATT) seeks to answer these key questions. The aim is to understand the extent, causes, and consequences of economic inequalities. The insights gained through WATT will provide a sound empirical basis for policy decisions.
Up to now, there has been a severe lack of data on top wealth holders in Germany. Through the use of an innovative sampling design, the SOEP has created a database on top wealth holders that is unique worldwide. Based on data from more than 270 million companies around the world, SOEP researchers selected all individuals who are both German residents and registered shareholders in at least one company. These formed the population for the new SOEP sample (N=2,000), which has been surveyed since late 2018. Respondents are interviewed using the standard SOEP-Core questionnaires, including the wealth module.
Team: Carsten Schroeder, Philipp Lersch, Charlotte Bartels, Markus M. Grabka