The recent rise in inequality in many societies is an important topic in current social science and is of increasing concern in public policy-making (OECD 2011, Stiglitz 2012, Ostry et al. 2014). High inequality may harm the economy because credit rationing prevents the poor from investing in education and weakens innovations . Most recent findings of the OECD (2014) also point to a negative...
Completed Project| German Socio-Economic Panel study
Development of a dynamic framework to depict and compare the effects of wealth policy instruments in the short, medium, and long term. Among the examined instruments are a general wealth tax, a social inheritance, and a social dividend.
Completed Project| Macroeconomics, Forecasting and Economic Policy
This research project examines the revenue and distributional effects of a wealth tax on households in Germany. Various scenarios with progressive tax rates and high personal allowances are analyzed, including special provisions for business assets, real estate, and retirement savings. The simulation calculations are based on microdata from the PHF/HFCS and SOEP, supplemented by additional...
How much do Germany’s top wealth holders own in assets? What are their socio-demographic and psychological characteristics? How do the rich get rich in the first place? And how involved are they in civic and political activities? The project Wealth-Holders at the Top (WATT) seeks to answer these key questions. The aim is to understand the extent, causes, and consequences of economic inequalities....
Completed Project| German Socio-Economic Panel study
The study analyses methods for calculating and allocating infrastructure costs (costs of construction, maintenance and operation of transport infrastructure) and estimates infrastructure costs and infrastructure revenues for road and rail in Germany in 2007. The methodology used is based on the principles laid down in the so-called Enquête Comission on Infrastructure Costs of the Federal Transport...
This proposed research will survey the theoretical and empirical works in the area of economic growth, international trade, resource depletion, and the environment, and apply the major findings in this area to the construction of an integrated multi-sector multi-region and multi-gas economy-climate model to study the effects of implementing the Kyoto Agreement on the global and European economies....
We conduct a stated preference experiment to analyze the effects of pension incentives, increasing retirement age, and provision of a partial retirement scheme on individuals’ preferences to work parttime and full-time beyond the early and legal retirement ages. We conduct the experiment in Germany, the Netherlands, South Korea, and the United States for an international comparative analysis.
The general objective of XPRESS project (full title: Support for Public Procurements to facilitate the collaboration between SMEs and public sector for the development and adoption in renewables in regions) is to facilitate the introduction of innovative Renewable Energy Supply (RES) technologies and increase the share of renewable energy in the final energy consumption..DIW’s Berlin part ...