The German Socio-Economic Panel Study was founded in the early 1980s, when it received its first round of financing from the German Research Foundation (DFG). Over the last twenty years, international SOEP conferences have been organized every two years, bringing international researchers together. The 9th International Socio-Economic Panel User Conference held in Berlin in 2010 again attracted significant interest within the SOEP scientific community and proved a great success in terms of the number of submissions and the quality of the papers.

The papers presented are evidence of the variety of perspectives household panel data offer to researchers: Such data make it possible to analyze processes of individual or household mobility over the life course, to assess the influence of institutional changes on individual behavior, and to understand the processes underlying the intergenerational transmission of well-being, attitudes, and values. For this special issue of Schmollers Jahrbuch, 17 conference papers focusing on Germany or offering cross-national comparisons were selected after a peer review process and grouped according to six thematic foci: family and inequality, intergenerational transmission, labor market mobility, income inequality, health, and effects of public policies on behavior.