In the last decade the available labor force has expanded in Germany—despite the decline in the working-age population. The reason: labor market participation has increased, for women in particular and older people in general. Also noticeable was a rise in qualification level because well-educated people have a particularly high propensity to participate in the labor market. Most recently, Germany’s ...
If the desire is to provide tax relief to households with lower and middle incomes in Germany, it is necessary to target the valueadded tax rather than the personal income tax. Lowering the standard value-added tax rate by one percentage point (from 19 to 18 percent) would mean relief worth 11 billion euro for consumers. The reduced value-added tax rate of seven percent should only be cut for food ...
Ownership of publicly listed German companies has undergone significant changes in recent years. The aim of this report is to document these trends since 2007 and analyze the extent to which firms that compete in the same product market are owned by the same investors, which is known as common ownership. We show that some large foreign institutional investors have overtaken domestic investors and now ...
2017| Jo Seldeslachts, Melissa Newham, Albert Banal-Estanol
This report examines how income groups and forms of employment in Germany have changed in the past two decades. Since the mid-1990s, inequality in disposable household income in Germany has generally increased. This trend was in effect until 2005. While fewer people had disposable incomes in the median range, the proportion of the population at both tails of the income distribution increased. At the ...
2017| Peter Krause, Christian Franz, Marcel Fratzscher
One focus of the G20 Summit in Hamburg in July 2017 was the United Nations’ sustainable development goals, including those set for the water sector. Despite progress, around 800 million people worldwide do not have adequate access to drinking water. Increasing block tariffs are an instrument widely used to support access to drinking water for poorer segments of the population. With this system, the ...
2017| Christian von Hirschhausen, Maya Flekstad, Georg Meran, Greta Sundermann
Although banks are required to document their equity capital for loans, corporate bonds, and other receivables, they are currently exempted from the procedure when investing in government bonds: they enjoy an “equity capital privilege.” As part of the Basel III regulatory framework redraft, the privilege may be eliminated in order to disentangle the default risks between sovereigns and banks. The present ...
Although the housing prices in the 127 largest German cities have surged strongly in recent years, there is still no sign of a Germanywide housing bubble. In comparison with 2009, the price of condominiums has risen by around 55 percent. Single-family houses cost between 38 and 45 percent more in 2016 than seven years prior, and building lot prices have risen by around 63 percent. The study at hand ...
Demographic projections for Germany indicate a drop in the population of many regions by 2030. This is likely to have an impact on the real estate market. Our report presents the result of a model calculation of asking prices for residential real estate in Germany up to 2030 based on market data from empirica-systeme GmbH and a population projection from the Bertelsmann Foundation. Depending on the ...