Rising income inequalities are widely debated in public and academic discourse. In this paper, we contribute to this debate by proposing a new family of measures of unfair inequality. To do so, we acknowledge that inequality is not bad per se, but that its underlying sources need to be taken...

While it is well documented that political participation is stratified by socio-economic characteristics, it is an open question how this finding bears on the evaluation of the democratic process with respect to its fairness. In this paper we draw on the analytical tools developed in the...

When measuring income inequality over long periods of time, accounting for population and productivity growth is important. This paper presents three alternative measures of top income shares that more explicitly account for population and income growth than the standard measure. We apply these...

Previous estimates of inequality of opportunity (IOp) are lower bounds because of the unobservability of the full set of endowed characteristics beyond the sphere of individual responsibility. Knowing the true size of unfair IOp, however, is important for the acceptance of (some) inequality and...

Are the United States still a land of opportunity? We provide new insights on this question by invoking a novel measurement approach that allows us to target the joint distribution of income and wealth. We show that inequality of opportunity has increased by 77% over the time period 1983-2016....

The highly dynamic nature of the COVID-19 crisis poses an unprecedented challenge to policy makers around the world to take appropriate income-stabilizing countermeasures. To properly design such policy measures, it is important to quantify their effects in real-time. However, data on the...

Whether observed differences in redistributive policies across countries are the result of differences in social preferences or efficiency constraints is an important question that paves the debate about the optimality of welfare regimes. To shed new light on this question, we estimate labor...

We provide a comprehensive analysis of income inequality and income dynamics for Germany over the last two decades. Combining personal income tax and social security data allows us - for the first time - to offer a complete picture of the distribution of annual earnings in Germany. We find that...