Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Department of Social Sciences - Berlin Graduate School of Social Science

Cohort

BGSS Generation 2024

Title

Asset Poverty and its Persistence over the Life Course in Germany

Supervisor

Prof. Dr. Philipp Lersch

Abstract

My dissertation will examine asset poverty and its persistence over the life course in Germany, taking an intergenerational life course perspective. Asset poverty deprives people of benefitting from the various functions of wealth and is therefore consequential for people’s living standards, making it a central dimension of poverty. I further focus on the persistence of asset poverty, because poverty durations are central for capturing the exclusionary effects of poverty, and conceptualize the intergenerational reproduction of asset poverty as a particularly persistent form of poverty. The research project aims at describing the incidence of asset poverty and its persistence over the life course and at identifying the role educational attainment plays, both intra- and intergenerationally. This focus is coupled with an analysis of the impact of specific life course events on poverty entries and exits and an analysis of how this impact differs by educational groups. Panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) are used. My research contributes both to poverty research and to the study of wealth mobility over the life course and between generations, being thus consequential also for research on the inequality of opportunity and on the development of wealth inequality.

Institution

Institut für Sozialwissenschaften, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin