SOEP Research: Inequality and Mobility

Optimal Taxation under Different Concepts of Justness

A common assumption in the optimal taxation literature is that the social planner maximizes a welfarist social welfare function with weights decreasing with income. However, high transfer withdrawal rates in many countries imply very low weights for the working poor in practice. We reconcile this puzzle by generalizing the optimal taxation framework by Saez (2002) to allow for alternatives to welfarism. ...

Top Incomes in Germany, 1871-2013

This study provides new homogeneous series on top income shares in Germany from the early phase of industrialization until present. German income tax statistics offer the unique possibility to go back as far as 1871 and produce series for eight German states ranging from heavily industrializing Prussia or Saxony to mostly agrarian Baden or Wurttemberg. Top income earners in Germany are mostly business ...

Income groups and types of employment in Germany since 1995

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 ...

"Regular employment continues to play important role": Five questions for Peter Krause and Christian Franz

Mr. Krause, you took a close look at income groups in Germany. What did you hope to accomplish? Peter Krause: We wanted to bring together two discussion threads in our study. One thread has to do with the long-term trend in inequality of household income distribution and the other, with changes in labor force participation. Until the mid-2000s, inequality in disposable household income increased and ...

Income Groups and Types of Employment in Germany since 1995

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 ...

Regular Employment Continues to Play Important Role: Interview with Peter Krause and Christian Franz

The Rising Longevity Gap by Lifetime Earnings: Distributional Implications for the Pension System

This study uses German social security records to provide novel evidence about the heterogeneity in life expectancy by lifetime earnings and, additionally, documents the distributional implications of this earnings-related heterogeneity. We find a strong association between lifetime earnings and life expectancy at age 65 and show that the longevity gap is increasing across cohorts. For West German ...

Children's Opportunities in Germany - An Application Using Multidimensional Measures

Single parents and unmarried couples are increasingly replacing the traditional nuclear family. This paper investigates if the greater variety in living arrangements contributes to increased resource disparities among children in Germany. Children in single parent families are disadvantaged in at least three dimensions decisive for their later achievements: material standard of living, parental education, ...

Longitudinal Wealth Data and Multiple Imputation: An Evaluation Study

Statistical analysis in surveys is generally facing missing data. In longitudinal studies for some missing values there might be past or future data points available. The question arises how to successfully transform this advantage into improvedimputation strategies. In a simulation study the authors compare six combinations of cross-sectional and longitudinal imputation strategies for German wealth ...

Inequality-Minimization with a Given Public Budget

We solve the problem of a social planner who seeks to minimize inequality via transfers with a fixed public budget in a distribution of exogenously given incomes. The appropriate solution method depends on the objective function: If it is convex, as in the case of the absolute mean deviation, it can be solved by an interior-point algorithm. If it is quasiconvex, as in case of the Gini coefficient, ...