Politics and business often involve making risky or dangerous decisions whose outcomes can be predicted only with difficulty, if at all. As attitudes toward risks and dangers vary between individuals, it is reasonable that people with different attitudes are active in areas requiring decisions...

Young people's leisure activities are significantly different today than they were ten years ago. The obvious use of communication and entertainment electronics, such as cell phones, computers, and games consoles is only one aspect - there are also less visible changes: informal activities such...

Almost twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, far more eastern Germans are unhappy with their income than western Germans. In 2013, around 44 percent of employed eastern Germans rated their earnings as unjust compared with approximately one-third in western Germany. Although the...

People's expectations after the fall of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago and of reunification in 1990 were huge. The government promised to create "flourishing landscapes" within a few years. The euphoria of reunification came not only through the desire to finally become one country and one nation...

It is now a quarter of a century since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the gap in living standards between eastern and western Germany is still not fully closed. Admittedly, this could not realistically have been expected. Despite the increase in life satisfaction in eastern Germany, the...

According to calculations based on the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study, the proportion of middle-income group in Germany fell by six percentage points from 1991 to 2013, taking it to 54 percent. Germany is not the only country to have experienced such a downturn, however. Analyses of the...

Calculations based on data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) show that after the introduction of a statutory minimum wage in Germany in January 2015, the wage growth of eligible employees with low wages accelerated significantly. Before the reform, the nominal growth in contractual hourly...

Since the beginning of 2016, the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study has been conducting a monthly survey of German attitudes, expectations, and fears concerning migration. The third wave of the survey,-the Barometer of Public Opinion on Refugees in Germany (Stimmungsbarometer zu Geflüchteten in...

A new representative survey of a total of 4,500 recently arrived refugees to Germany conducted by the Institute for Employment Research (IAB), the Research Centre of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF-FZ), and the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) at the German Institute for...