Stock Market Participation, Work from Home, and Inequality: Replication Package

Replication Package: "Stock Market Participation, Work from Home, and Inequality" Lorenz Meister, Lukas Menkhoff, and Carsten Schröder (2025) This repository contains the complete replication code for the paper "Stock Market Participation, Work from Home, and Inequality" (Meister, Menkhoff, and Schröder, 2025). The paper studies whether the COVID-19-induced shift to working from home increased stock market participation among employed household heads in Germany, and examines the distributional consequences for income inequality. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP v40), we find that remote work significantly raised the probability of stock market entry, with effects concentrated among lower- and middle-income households. The analysis employs OLS, IV (2SLS), and Theil Index decomposition methods, instrumenting work-from-home status with pre-pandemic industry-level WfH capacity following Jean-Victor Alipour, Oliver Falck, Simone Schüller (2020). The package includes 15 Stata scripts that replicate all tables and figures in the paper and its appendices, a master run file, a README with data access instructions, and a variable codebook. No data files are included. The main analysis requires access to SOEP v40 (available via the DIW Berlin Research Data Centre) and the Bundesbank Panel on Household Finances (PHF). Several publicly available auxiliary datasets (Eurostat, OECD, Deutsches Aktieninstitut, Google Trends) are documented in the README.