Social norms are put forward as a prominent explanation for the changing labour supply decisions of women. This paper studies the intergenerational transmission of these norms, examining how they affect subsequent female labour supply decisions, taking into account not only the early socialization of women but also that of their partner. Using large representative panel data sets from West Germany, ...
This paper examines how wealth and income inequality dynamics are related to fluctuations in the functional income distribution over the business cycle. In a panel estimation for OECD countries between 1970 and 2016, although inequality is, on average countercyclical and significantly associated with the capital share, one-third of the countries display a pro- or noncyclical relationship. To analyze ...
Natural gas prices in Germany saw a strong increase at the end of 2021, subsequently worsening with the start of the war in Ukraine in February 2022, raising concerns about the distributional consequences. Our study shows that low-income households are affected the most by the natural gas price increase. Low-income households pay at the median 11.70 percent of their equivalent income on gas bills, ...
We investigate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on self-employed people’s mental health. Using representative longitudinal survey data from Germany, we reveal differential effects by gender: whereas self-employed women experienced a substantial deterioration in their mental health, self-employed men displayed no significant changes up to early 2021. Financial losses are important in explaining these ...
Policymakers have been attempting to combat discrimination at all levels for a long time. However, the measures they take can only be successful if there is general awareness of the discrimination experienced by certain groups or people: Discrimination can only be addressed when people also recognize and acknowledge it is happening. Therefore, it is important to measure the extent to which the population ...
European societies have been experiencing growing income and wealth inequalities over the past few decades, and, accordingly, they are a topic of intense discussion. Although the population’s evaluation of inequalities as just or unjust is important for designing social policies, there has been little research on this evaluation. To close this gap, we use justice evaluations of income and wealth in ...
We present evidence from a repeated survey on risky asset holdings carried out on a representative sample of the German population six times between April and June 2020. Given the size of the Covid-19 shock, we find little evidence of portfolio rebalancing in April 2020. In May, however, individual investors started buying heavily, parallel to market recovery. The cross-section shows large differences ...