What are the long-term economic effects of a more equal distribution of wealth? We exploit variation in historical inheritance rules for land traversing political, linguistic, geological, and religious borders in Germany. In some German areas, inherited land was to be shared or divided equally among children, while in others land was ruled to be indivisible. Using a geographic regression...
Normative-based distributional comparisons across countries and over time usually build upon the assumption that individuals are selfish. However, there is a consolidated evidence that individuals also care about what others have. In this paper we propose a framework for comparing and ranking distributions that includes non-individualistic possibilities. Specifically, we consider ranking criteria that ...
This paper presents the first comprehensive study of the long-run evolution of wealth inequality in Germany. We combine tax data, surveys, national accounts and rich lists to study the distribution of wealth in Germany from 1895 to 2018. We show that the concentration of wealth in the hands of the top 1% has fallen by half, from close to 50% in 1895 to less than 25% today. The interwar period as well ...
What are the long-term economic effects of a more equal distribution of wealth? We exploit variation in historical inheritance rules for land traversing political, linguistic, geological, and religious borders in Germany. In some German areas, inherited land was to be shared or divided equally among children, while in others land was ruled to be indivisible. Using a geographic regression discontinuity ...
Given how controversially inequality is still being discussed by both academics and policy makers in Germany, we discuss methodological issues related to the measurement of inequalities and review the literature and empirical estimates of different forms of inequality. One important issue is the choice of the measure of well-being: the central measures discussed are household equivalent disposable ...
Research on couple bargaining and housework allocation focuses almost exclusively on partners’ economic resources. In this study, we ask whether additional bargaining resources, namely physical appearance and social networks, may exert a distinct effect – that is, whether partners can mobilize multiple resources within their bargaining framework. A focus on multiple bargaining chips is made possible ...
The corona pandemic and the political measures undertaken to contain it are changing the working conditions of many people in Germany. Based on data from the first tranche of a supplementary survey (SOEP-Cov) to the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), this study analyzes the effects of the corona crisis on Germany’s working population in 2019. In this paper, we investigate how severely people have ...