The 11th SOEP User Conference focused on two broad areas: socio-economic inequalities and migration, reflecting the growing interest of the social sciences in understanding the inter-temporal patterns behind these phenomena and their implications for modern welfare states. As the potentials of longitudinal data in these research domains remain vastly underexplored, the conference sought to provide a forum to discuss the potentials of panel data and to promote the possibilities of these data to research community. Excerpt from the editorial