Findings show that midlife wealth is lower and more unequally distributed among Generation X than among Baby Boomers in East and West Germany across all wealth components, supporting a general trend towards generational decline. Even 30 years after the German reunification, the communist legacy of East Germany is associated with persistently lower midlife wealth for Generation X in East Germany compared to West Germany, including substantially lower housing equity and higher consumer debt. The explanatory power of different mechanisms for generational change in midlife wealth distributions differs notably across East and West Germany and across different locations of the wealth distribution. For instance, family demographic change is much more strongly associated with declining wealth across generations in East Germany than in West Germany. The talk concludes by discussing broader implications for mechanisms and policies that can affect generational change in midlife wealth beyond the East-West German comparison.the Study.
Public perception suggests that young adults coming of age are increasingly economically worse off than their parents. However, we lack systematic comparisons of wealth accumulation and inequality across birth cohorts at the same life stage. Midlife wealth has particular social and economic significance, as life course norms expect economic independence and achievement by midlife, and midlife investments can yield large returns in the second half of life. In this study, we compare trends in midlife wealth accumulation and wealth inequality for Baby Boomers (1954-63) and Generation X (1969-78) at ages 30-39 in former East and West German regions using data from the German Income and Expenditure Survey (EVS, 1993 and 2008) and quantile regression and quantile decomposition methods to account for generational change. We theorize four mechanisms that could bring about generational change in midlife wealth accumulation and wealth inequality: 1) economic changes, including labor market restructuring, 2) financial mechanisms, such as rising interest rates, access to homeownership, cost of living and changing consumption patterns, 3) demographic change, including family life and household composition, and 4) social policy change, such as welfare state retrenchment that can particularly impact the bottom of wealth distributions.
Professor Anette Éva Fasang, is Professor of Sociology at the Department of Social Science at Humboldt University of Berlin. She received a Ph.D. in Sociology from the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences at Jacobs University Bremen and conducted postdoctoral research at the Center for Research on Inequalities and the Life Course at Yale University and at Columbia University. From 2011 to 2014, she was Assistant Professor of Demography at Humboldt University of Berlin. From 2011 to 2019 she was head of the research group Demography and Inequality at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. Anette Eva Fasang holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Turku and has won the Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for Excellence in Work-Family Research in 2018 and 2023. She was the academic director of the Berlin Graduate School of Social Sciences from 2018-2025 and the Chair of the Department of Social Sciences at Humboldt University of Berlin from 2023-2025. She was recently elected as a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (2025) and the European Academy of Sociology (2024).
Anette Fasang is Principle Investigator of the Excellence Cluster “Contestations of the Liberal Script (SCRIPTS)”, the Graduate School DYNAMICS, and the Einstein Center for Population Diversity.
Her research interests include life course sociology, social demography, comparative welfare state research, young adulthood in global perspective, generational change, family sociology, and quantitative and qualitative methods for longitudinal data analysis. Recent work has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Population and Development Review, Journal of Marriage and Family, European Sociological Review, and Sociological Methodology.