This paper documents methodology underlying the construction of the integrated data base for our study on “Wer trägt die Steuerlast in Deutschland? – Verteilungswirkungen des deutschen Steuer- und Transfersystems” (Who bears the tax burden in Germany? – Distributional Analyses of the German tax and transfer system). Financial support from the Hans Böckler Stiftung for the project is gratefully acknowledged. ...
A puzzle of the modern welfare state is that a large fraction of social benefits is not takenup. Using a laboratory experiment, we present evidence that stigmatization through publicexposure causally reduces the take-up of a redistributive transfer by 30 percentage points.We build a theoretical model that interprets welfare stigma as unfavorable inferencesabout the claimant's type. Our design exogenously ...
A comprehensive, microdata-based analysis of the German tax system's distributional effects in 2015 shows that the total tax burden from direct and indirect taxes is slightly progressive on higher income, but regressive in the lower deciles. Income and corporate taxes are distinctly progressive. They impose hardly any burden on lower- and middle-income households, but the average burden significantly ...
We employ German social security records to investigate intragenerational lifetime earnings inequality and mobility of yearly earnings for 35 cohorts, starting with the birth year 1935. Our main result is a striking secular rise of intragenerational inequality in lifetime earnings: West German men born in the early 1960s are likely to experience about 85% more lifetime inequality than their fathers. ...
This paper investigates the relationship between wealth, ageing and saving behaviour of private households by using pooled cross sections of German consumption survey data. Different components of wealth are distinguished, as their impact on the savings rate is not homogeneous. On average, the effect attributed to real estate dominates the other components of wealth. In addition, the savings rate strongly ...
This paper uncovers ongoing trends in idiosyncratic earnings volatility across generations by decomposing residual earnings auto-covariances into a permanent and a transitory component. We employ data on complete earnings life cycles for prime age men born 1935 through 1974 that covers earnings between 1960 and 2009. Over this period, the German labor market undergoes a heavy transformation and experiences ...