Topic Inequality

The Costs of Natural Gas Dependency: Price Shocks, Inequality, and Public Policy

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, ...

Pandemic Depression: COVID-19 and the Mental Health of the Self-Employed

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 ...

The Gender Gap in Lifetime Earnings: The Role of Parenthood

To obtain a more complete understanding of the persisting gender earnings gap in Germany, this paper investigates both the cross-sectional and biographical dimension of gender inequalities. Using an Oaxaca Blinder decomposition, we show that the gender gap in annual earnings is largely driven by women’s lower work experience and intensive margin of labor supply. Based on a dynamic microsimulation model, ...

Rent Control Reduces Economic Inequality at a Price

Over the course of the 20th century, governments have frequently used rent control to keep rents affordable, especially in times of crisis when housing is scarce. Existing research shows that rent control has undesirable side effects, such as overall societal welfare losses, market misallocation, a declining housing supply, and lower mobility. However, there has been little research examining the effect ...

Evidenzbasierte Verbandsarbeit: der erweiterte Ethikkodex des Vereins für Socialpolitik

Der neue Ethikkodex des Vereins für Socialpolitik nimmt Stellung gegen die Diskriminierung von Frauen und Minderheiten, sexuelle und anderweitige Belästigung im Arbeitsumfeld sowie das Schaffen eines feindseligen Umfelds. Neuere Untersuchungen zeigen, dass eine Gleichberechtigung von Frauen und Minderheiten in der Volkswirtschaftslehre noch nicht vorliegt. Der erweiterte Ethikkodex ist ein Schritt ...

Care and Careers: Gender (In)Equality in Unpaid Care, Housework and Employment

This article examines whether reducing care and housework duties and redistributing them within different-sex couples could further enhance gender equality on the labor market in terms of labor market participation for different employment types and actual working hours. Women around the world perform the majority of unpaid care and housework, with a large and persistent gap to men. Most research explains ...

Gender Gaps in Employment, Working Hours and Wages in Germany: Trends and Developments over the Last 35 Years

The Role of Different School Organizational Models in the Psychological Adaptation of Refugee Adolescents

Given the high number of refugee children and adolescents around the globe, it is critical to determine conditions that foster their adaptation in the receiving country. This study investigated the psychological adaptation of recently arrived adolescent refugees in Germany. We focused on whether psychological adaptation reflects the organizational approach taken by the school that refugee adolescents ...

Income-Dependent Equivalence Scales and Choice Theory: Implications for Poverty Measurement

Equivalence Scales are a tool for removing the heterogeneity of household sizes in the measurement of inequality, and affect poverty assessments and poverty lines. We address the disadvantage that poor households may suffer due to their reduced ability to share goods within the household. This disadvantage is important to estimate and embed in standard analysis, as it seems to have a substantial quantitative ...

Rent Control Effects through the Lens of Empirical Research

Rent control is a highly debated social policy that has been omnipresent since World War I. Since 2010s, it has been experiencing a true renaissance, for many cities and countries facing housing shortage are desperately looking for solutions of the chronic housing shortage and direct their attention to controlling housing rents and to other restrictive policies. Is rent control useful or does it create ...