Das Ausmaß der Vermögenskonzentration in Deutschland lässt sich aufgrund der stark eingeschränkten Datenlage zu hohen Vermögen kaum abschätzen. Dementsprechend sieht auch der fünfte Armuts- und Reichtumsbericht der Bundesregierung weiteren Bedarf, die Datenlage in diesem Bereich zu verbessern (Bundesregierung, 2017). Wir haben eine Machbarkeitsstudie durchgeführt, in der ein innovatives Konzept entwickelt, ...
High-worth individuals are typically underrepresented or completely missing in population surveys. The lack of a register-based sampling frame on high-worth individuals in many countries challenged previous attempts to sample high-worth individuals in voluntary scientific surveys. In a novel research design, we draw on register data on the shareholding structures of companies as a sampling frame. Our ...
Household survey data provide a rich information set on income, household context and demographic variables, but tend to under report incomes at the very top of the distribution. Administrative data like tax records offer more precise information on top incomes, but at the expense of household context details and incomes of non-filers at the bottom of the distribution. We combine the benefits of the ...
Generous income support programs as provided by European welfare states have often been blamed to hamper employment. This paper investigates the importance of incentives inherent in the tax-benefit system for the individual decision to take up work. Using German microdata over the period 1993-2010 we find that recent reforms in Germany increased work incentives at the extensive margin measured by the ...
Generous income support programs as provided by European welfare states have often been blamed to reduce work incentives for the lowskilled and to increase durations of unemployment. Standard studies measure work incentives based on annual income concepts. This paper analyzes work incentives inherent in the German tax-benefit system when extending the time horizon to three years (long-term). Participation ...
Welfare states redistribute both between individuals reducing annual inequality and over the life-cycle insuring against income risks. But studies measuring redistribution often focus only on a one-year period. Using German SOEP data from 1984 to 2009, long-term inequality over a 20-year period is computed and then decomposed into an inter- and intra-individual component. Results show that annual inequality ...
Deploying data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) we analyze the variability of individual earnings and equivalent household income. Permanent and transitory variances of male income over the period 1984-2008 are estimated for Old German Laender in order to determine their importance to income dynamics. To uncover the role of the welfare state in smoothening earnings shocks we compute different ...
