Topic Inequality

STEM Careers: Workshops Using Role Model Can Reduce Gender Stereotypes

Women continue to be underrepresented in STEM occupations (science, technology, engineering, and math). Based on a survey among secondary school students in Vienna, we show, for instance, that girls’ career aspirations, interests, and self-assessed skills in STEM fields are related to gender stereo- types. Parents also play a crucial role in this context. Further results indicate that a half-day career ...

The Gender Pay Gap Begins to Increase Sharply at Age of 30

The gender pay gap increases with age: While the average gross hourly wage gap between male and female 30-year-olds is nine percent, the gap triples to 28 percent by the age of 50. This stark increase is due to differences in employment behavior in the decades between the ages of 30 and 50. Beginning at age 30, women often switch to part-time work to be able to provide childcare, whereas men tend to ...

Wealth inequality and wealth taxes – an OECD Perspective

Sarah Perret, OECD, will present findings from a recent report on The Role and Design of Net Wealth Taxes in the OECD. The presentation will give an overview of the cases for and against net wealth taxes, as well as describe how wealth taxes have been designed in practice in the OECD countries that currently have or historically had net wealth taxes. Inheritance taxes, which constitute an...

A question of gender: How promotions affect earnings

Occupational positions can explain an important part of the differences in pay between men and women. However, a considerable Gender Pay Gap exists even within the same occupational position. In this paper, we aim at understanding the reason for the gap within occupational positions and, therefore, investigate whether promotions lead to the same effect on earnings growth for men and women....

Average Wage Gaps and Expected Wage Cuts - An Investigation of Selection Neglect Bias in Income Expectations

Economists spend much of their lives talking about and correcting for sample selection. Recent evidence from behavioral economics documents that participants in lab experiments don't account for selection effects when they interpret conditional distributions. This "selection neglect" can distort expectations in settings where individuals learn from comparisons with other people who differ in...

Does later retirement change your health care consumption? Evidence from France

This paper examines the causal impact of later retirement on outpatient care consumption among the French elderly. Outpatient care are defined as all the care provided out of the hospital setting. This question is of interest since spill effects may arise if later retirement increases health care expenditures. To deal with reverse causality issue, I use, as an instrumental variable, the 1993...

Salience of Inherited Wealth and the Support for Inheritance Taxation

Abstract: We study how attitudes to inheritance taxation are influenced by information about the role of inherited wealth in society. Using a randomized experiment in a register-linked Swedish survey, we find that informing individuals about the large aggregate importance of inherited wealth and its link to inequality of opportunity significantly increases the support for inheritance taxation. The...

Investment Losses and Inequality

Systematic differences along the wealth distribution in investment performance will potentially have large consequences for the level and persistence of wealth inequality. These differences in performance are hard to measure except in a few, select countries with detailed information on household portfolios. In this paper we use a modified version of the Global Capital Asset Pricing Model ...

Wealth inequality in Germany, 1895-2017

(together with Thilo Albers (HU Berlin) und Moritz Schularick (Uni Bonn)) This paper provides the first long-run wealth inequality series for Germany. We combine wealth tax data, survey data, national accounts' household balance sheets, and lists of large wealth holders to study the accumulation and distribution of wealth in Germany from 1895 to 2017. We find that wealth concentration in...

The Roots of Inequality: Estimating Inequality of Opportunity from Regression Trees and Forests