A tribute to Prof. Dr. Richard Hauser and his Contributions to LIS
by Professor Timothy Smeeding (LIS Founder and Director Emeritus (1983-2006))
The LIS project technical details first outlined at a meeting in Luxembourg in August 1983. Gaston Schaber was financing the beginning stages and I, as new project director, was looking for partners to make sure the enterprise would be a success. The first European partner was Germany. And its leader, Richard Hauser, Professor at Goethe University and Director of Sonderforgunsbereich (SFB) 3 a Collaborative Research Center on “Microanalytic Foundations of Social Policy.”, was the most enthusiastic and the most helpful European partner I had as the project began and through its first 20 years.
In fall 1983, Richard immediately invited me to Frankfurt to meet his team of graduate students, including Bernard Engel, Roland Eisen, Ingo Fischer, Irene Becker and others. I stayed a month and learned a great deal about central European social programs and policies from Richard and his students while also drinking bimbles of apfel wine in Sachsenhausen.
Richard was the author or co-author of three of the first 10 LIS working papers, including the first substantive paper , Poverty in Major Industrialized Countries, by Timothy Smeeding, Richard Hauser, Lee Rainwater, Martin Rein, and Gaston Schaber in July 1985; the first paper on one parent families , The Relative Economic Status of One Parent Families in Six Major Countries, by Ingo Fischer, Richard Hauser December,1985; and the first paper on noncash benefits in Germany in 1987.
Richard became a leader of the LIS advisory board, a staunch LIS supporter and a dear friend, as my family and I would visit him and Elizabeth at their home in Germany for many years.
At SFB 3, Richard was instrumental in laying the foundations for—and subsequently expanding—the German SOEP (German Socio-Economic Panel), which later moved to the DIW (German Institute for Economic Research) under the leadership of Hans-Jürgen Krupp and Gert Wagner, and which became the source of German LIS data as well as a dynamic panel dataset In the late 1980’s Richard visited me in Nashville, TN, at Vanderbilt where he met Richard Burkhauser and together we began the panel data version of LIS called the Cross-National Equivalent File , with the GSOEP and original member.
I will always remember Richard as friendly, enthusiastic, committed and supportive of cross-national research. He was a true leader of his time and LIS was much better for it.
Big hug for his wife, Elizabeth, and may my dear friend rest in peace.
Tim Smeeding
April, 2026