Topic Inequality

Higher fossil fuel prices and a climate dividend: burdens on and relief of households

The Gender (Tax) Gap in Parental Transfers. Evidence from administrative inheritance and gift tax data.

This study examines how inheritance and gift tax systems in combination with gendered parental transfer behavior strengthen gender wealth inequalities. Gender differences in transfers can be reproduced if men benefit differently than women from tax exemptions. This might happen when men and women receive different types of assets where only some are tax exempted. To investigate gendered parental...

The role of inherited wealth for wealth inequality in Germany

In this project, a top-corrected wealth distribution is estimated on the basis of the inheritance tax statistics and the SOEP. We analyze the concentration of wealth, the portfolios of the wealthy, the importance of inherited wealth, the gender inheritance gap and the gender wealth gap as well as reactions to inheritance taxation.

The Heterogeneous Effects of Social Assistance and Unemployment Insurance: Evidence from a Life-Cycle Model of Family Labor Supply and Savings

We empirically analyze the heterogeneous welfare effects of unemployment insurance and social assistance. We estimate a structural life-cycle model of singles' and married couples' labor supply and savings decisions. The model includes heterogeneity by age, education, wealth, sex and household composition. In aggregate, social assistance dominates unemployment insurance; however, the opposite holds ...

Gender Care Gap and Gender Pay Gap Increase Substantially until Middle Age

While the gender pay gap between men and women in Germany remains at 18 percent, this figure is not the same for all employees. There are, for example, major differences by age. Beginning at age 30, the gender pay gap increases sharply and remains constantly high at 20 percent until retirement. Closely related to this is the gender care gap, the difference in unpaid care work between women and men. ...

Midijob Reform: Increased Redistribution in Pension Insurance – Noticeable Costs, Relief Not Well Targeted

The German Federal Government has expanded subsidies for employees with low gross wages (midijob employees) as of January 1, 2023, and raised the upper earnings limit to 2,000 euros. As a result, around 6.2 million midijob employees will benefit from paying reduced social security contributions while still receiving their full pension entitlements, made possible by a redistribution within the social ...

Causal Misperceptions of the Part-Time Pay Gap

This paper studies if workers infer from correlation about causal effects in the context of the part-time wage penalty. Differences in hourly pay between full-time and part-time workers are strongly driven by worker selection and systematic sorting. Ignoring these selection effects can lead to biased expectations about the consequences of working part-time on wages (’selection neglect bias’). Based ...

Can a Federal Minimum Wage Alleviate Poverty and Income Inequality? Ex-post and Simulation Evidence from Germany

Minimum wages are increasingly discussed as an instrument against (in-work) poverty and income inequality in Europe. Just recently the German government opted for a substantial ad-hoc increase of the minimum-wage level to euro12 per hour mentioning poverty prevention as an explicit goal. We use the introduction of the federal minimum wage in Germany in 2015 to study its redistributive impact on disposable ...

Essays in Applied Economics

This dissertation consists of five independent chapters contributing to the field of applied economics. The first three chapters analyze workers' perceptions of the wage penalty associated with working part-time, further evaluating the labor supply implications of biased beliefs. Chapter 4 quantifies the effects of raising the normal retirement age on the career trajectories of middle-aged workers ...

(Unintended) Consequences of Social and Family Policies on Health and Well-Being: Five Essays in Health and Family Economics

Diese Dissertation besteht aus fünf unabhängigen Kapiteln, die einen Beitrag zur Literatur im Bereich der Gesundheits- und Familienökonomie leisten. Das Hauptthema ist die Frage, wie sich sozial- und familienpolitische Maßnahmen auf die Gesundheit und das Wohlbefinden von verschiedenen Generationen - Kindern, Eltern und Großeltern - auswirken.Kapitel 2 analysiert den kausalen Effekt einer Anhebung ...