Topic Inequality

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

The gender wage gap and the role of policy: Analyzing patterns over time, over the life cycle and across the wage distribution

The gender wage gap is a persistent and pervasive phenomenon observable in virtually all countries. It has strong implications for a society since it is one main driver of inequality in a country. Therefore, there exists an active public debate and an important academic literature that describes and quantifies the gender wage gap, analyses the reasons for this gap and discusses potential policy...

Was Marx Right? Income Inequality, Market Concentration and Voting in late 19th Century Germany

The  recent  debate  on  the  causes  and  consequences  of  income  inequality shows striking similarity to the debate in many parts of Europe before 1914. Today and back then the focus was on the role of capital share and market concentration as a cause for rising inequality.  In this study we analyze the drivers and consequences of...

Selection into Employment and the Gender Wage Gap across the Distribution and over Time

Using quantile regression methods, this paper analyses the gender wage gap across the wage distribution and over time (1990-2014), while controlling for changing sample selection into full-time employment. Our findings show that the selection-corrected gender wage gap is much larger than the one observed in the data, which is mainly due to large positive selection of women into fulltime employment. ...

100 Years of the Modern German Tax System: Foundation, Reforms, and Challenges

The tax and fiscal reforms headed by German finance minister Matthias Erzberger in 1919 and 1920 fundamentally reshaped German public finances. The total tax revenue as a percentage of GDP, or tax-to-GDP ratio, doubled and increased continually until the end of World War II. Since the 1950s, the tax-to-GDP ratio has remained between 22 and 24 percent of GDP most of the time. West Germany’s economic ...

Looking for the Missing Rich: Tracing the Top Tail of the Wealth Distribution

We analyse the top tail of the wealth distribution in France, Germany, and Spain using the first and second waves of the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). Since top wealth is likely to be under-represented in household surveys, we integrate big fortunes from rich lists, estimate a Pareto distribution, and impute the missing rich. In addition to the Forbes list, we rely on national rich ...

Does the German Minimum Wage Help Low Income Households? Evidence from Observed Outcomes and the Simulation of Potential Effects

Does the federal minimum wage in Germany introduced in 2015 improve the income situation of low income households and reduce in-work poverty? Previous literature on its distributional impact was either focused on earnings and hourly wages (e.g. Caliendo et al., 2017), or is based on ex-ante simulations (e.g. Müller and Steiner, 2013). This paper provides systematic descriptive ex-post evidence on the ...

A Stable and Social Europe: Fiscal Rules, a Stabilization Fund, Insolvency Rules, Gender Quota, Gender Pension Gaps, and Education: Reports