Topic Inequality

Distributional and Behavioral Effects of the Gender Wage Gap

The gender wage gap is a persistent labor market phenomenon. Most research focuses on the determinants of these wage differences. We contribute to this literature by exploring a different research question: if wages of women are systematically lower than male wages, what are the distributional consequences (disposable income) and what are the labor market effects (labor supply) of the wage gap? We ...

Tax and Transfer System: Considerable Redistribution Mainly via Social Insurance

Overall monetary redistribution via the tax and transfer system leads to net incomes being much more evenly distributed in Germany than market income. As a result, in 2011, the Gini coefficient decreased from 0.5 for market income to 0.29 for household disposable income. The social security system has a significant share in total income redistribution by the government, making up more than half of ...

Redistribution Reduces Inequality in Household Incomes: Six Questions to Stefan Bach

Distributional and Behavioral Effects of the Gender Wage Gap

The gender wage gap is a persistent labor market phenomenon. Most research focuses on the determinants of these wage differences. We contribute to this literature by exploring a different research question: if wages of women are systematically lower than male wages, what are the distributional consequences (disposable income) and what are the labor market effects (labor supply) of the wage gap? We ...

Income and Assets of Care Households in Germany

In 2013, some 2.6 million people received long-term care benefits. The number of benefit recipients has risen by 45 percent since 1998. A good 70 percent of benefit recipients, roughly 1.7 million people, are cared for at home and nearly 30 percent in a nursing facility. There are also a significant number of individuals who are dependent on care but not to such an extent that they are entitled to ...

Long-Term Home Care Recipients Are Often Women Who Live Alone: Six Questions to Johannes Geyer

Lifetime Earnings Inequality in Germany

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. ...

Do Wealthier Households Save More? The Impact of the Demographic Factor

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 ...

Poverty and Transitions in Health in Later Life

Using a sample of Europeans aged 50+ from 12 countries in the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), we analyse the role of poor material conditions as a determinant of changes in health over a four- to five-year period. We find that poverty defined with respect to relative income has no effect on changes in health. However, broader measures of poor material conditions, such as ...

Distributional Effects of a Minimum Wage in a Eelfare State: The Case of Germany

A popular argument for a federal minimum wage is that it will prevent in-work poverty and reduce income inequality. We examine this assertion for Germany, a welfare state with a relative generous means-tested social minimum and high marginal tax rates. Our analysis is based on a microsimulation model that accounts for the interactions between wages, the tax-benefit system and net incomes at the household ...