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Charitable Giving and Income: Households with High Income Donate Less than Poorer Households Relative to Their Disposable Income

For the first time in 2020, the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), an annual survey of private households, surveyed the donation behavior of a random sample of high net worth individuals that had been added in 2019. As a result of this sample, the volume of private donations increased from 9.7 to 10.3 billion euros in 2019, despite the fact that fewer individuals donated and the donation rate was lower (46.8 ...

Generational Wealth Inequality Across the Distribution: Trends in the U.S. since 1949

Using recently published U.S. long-run microdata (SCF+), we document that — for people born in the first half of the 20th century — median wealth used to increase from one ten-year birth cohort to another. For people born in the second half, median wealth successively declined from cohort to cohort and wealth inequality within birth cohorts has markedly increased. Shifts in...

Income and Wealth Inequality in Hong Kong, 1981–2020: The Rise of Pluto-Communism?

The objective of this paper is to better understand the evolution and institutional roots of Hong Kong's growing economic inequality and political cleavages. By combining multiple sources of data (household surveys, fiscal data, wealth rankings, national accounts) and methodological innovations, two main findings are obtained. First, he evidence suggests a very large rise in income and wealth inequality ...

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

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

Nearly 1.1 Million People in Germany Use Food Banks, Single and Separated Parents in Particular at an Above-Average Frequency

Food banks are returning to the spotlight as their use increases due to the coronavirus pandemic and the influx of Ukrainian refugees to Germany. The current discussion is focused on whether the food banks can handle the increasing number of users as well as the financial and organizational challenges that come with them. Until now, however, no robust, empirical data on food bank use has been available. ...

Special SOEP-Seminar

This paper evaluates the effects of the newly introduced German minimum wage on the distribution of hourly wages and hours worked. The study is based on the German Structure of Earnings Survey (GSES), the only large scale data set for Germany that includes information on hourly wages and hours worked. We provide a full distributional analysis based on counterfactual distributions that would have...

From Hartz IV to Bürgergeld: Reform Preferences of the Long-Term Unemployed

The German government is planning to reform Hartz IV by replacing it with a simpler and more accessible system known as Bürgergeld. Using a random-based survey of eight job centers in North Rhine-Westphalia, this Weekly Report considers the perspectives of the long-term unemployed: What do they think about the reforms? How do they perceive their situation? What are their daily lives like? The findings ...

Lifestyle Behaviors and Wealth-Health Gaps in Germany

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 ...

Distributional effects of financial support models for family caregivers

Informal care provided by family members is the central pillar of home care in Germany. In view of the increasing need for care and the shortage of skilled workers in formal care, the informal pillar may even gain in importance in the future. It is of central importance that informal caregivers find conditions that make it easier for them to engage in informal care. It is well known that informal...