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Wealth Tax The Left.

This research project examines the revenue and distributional effects of a wealth tax on households in Germany. Various scenarios with progressive tax rates and high personal allowances are analyzed, including special provisions for business assets, real estate, and retirement savings. The simulation calculations are based on microdata from the PHF/HFCS and SOEP, supplemented by additional...

Does Cognitive Reflection Relate to Preferences and Socio-Economic Outcomes?

Cognitive abilities are associated with key preferences and socio-economic outcomes. One of the most frequently studied cognitive abilities is cognitive reflection, the ability to avoid intuitive but potentially wrong decisions by switching to a more analytical mindset. Using rich panel data in this pre-registered study, we show that stronger cognitive reflection is significantly associated with more ...

Measuring Historical Inequality in Germany

This article surveys the measurement of historical wealth and income inequality in Germany. We discuss the underlying data sources, the challenges they pose, and the opportunities they create. We also identify two promising avenues for future research. First, we argue that the geographic granularity of German historical statistics provides researchers with the opportunity to investigate the causes ...

Routes to the Top

Who makes it to the top? We use the leading, socio-economic survey in Germany supplemented by extensive data on the rich to answer this question. We identify the key predictors for belonging to the top 1 percent of income, wealth, and both distributions jointly. Although we consider many, only a few traits matter: Entrepreneurship and self-employment in conjunction with a sizable inheritance of company ...

Workshop on Life-course Inequality Dynamics

Concerns about inequality and questions of social justice and cohesion have re-entered the public arena and animate debate. In his Nobel prize lecture in 2015, Angus Deaton has outlined three imperatives that are key to understanding inequalities and formulating welfare-enhancing policies: (I) Differences in resources across individuals should be measured not only at specific points in time but...

WEALTHTRAJECT: Understanding Trajectories of Wealth Accumulation and Their Variability

As part of the ERC Consolidator Grant WEALTHTRAJECT, Philipp Lersch will break new ground in wealth research over the next five years, and further expand the range of high quality data collection by SOEP. WEALTHTRAJECT is the first project to comprehensively and systematically investigate diversity in long-term wealth trajectories within and between social groups. The starting point of the...

Routes to the Top

Who makes it to the top? We use the leading socio-economic survey in Germany, supplemented by extensive data on the rich, to answer this question. We identify the key predictors for belonging to the top 1 percent of income, wealth, and both distributions jointly. Although we consider many, only a few traits matter: Entrepreneurship and self-employment in conjunction with a sizable inheritance of company ...

Basic Income and Labor Supply: Evidence from an RCT in Germany

How does basic income (a regular, unconditional, guaranteed cash transfer) impact labor supply? We show that in search models of the labor market with income effects, this impact is theoretically ambiguous: Employment and job durations might increase or decrease, match surplus might be shifted to workers or employers, and worker surplus might be reallocated between wages and job amenities. We thus ...

Long-Term Effects of Equal Sharing: Evidence from Inheritance Rules for Land

The Keys to the House - How Wealth Transfers Stratify Homeownership Opportunities

This study investigates how actual and anticipated intergenerational wealth transfers – i.e., inter vivos gifts and inheritances – contribute to inequalities in the transition to homeownership by parental social class. Utilizing discrete-time survival analysis on data from the German Socioeconomic Panel Study (N = 13,018), we find that individuals whose parents were manual workers or service workers ...