Generous income support programs as provided by European welfare states have often been blamed to reduce work incentives for the low-skilled and to increase durations of unemployment. Standard studies measure work incentives based on annual income concepts. This paper analyzes work incentives...

The discussion paper is concerned with the interplay between demography and macroeconomics on one hand and macroeconomics and income inequality on the other hand. For this purpose, several estimation equations are derived by econometric methods (on the empirical basis of the 1984-2010 German...

In this paper an alternative approach with regard to poverty measurement is discussed: the so-called decomposition approach. This method differentiates between various social groups in the sense that for each group a separate poverty line is determined. E. g., household size might be a criterion...

Welfare states redistribute both between individuals reducing annual inequality and over the life-cycle insuring against income risks. But studies measuring redistribution often focus only on a one-year period. Using German SOEP data from 1984 to 2009, long-term inequality over a 20-year period...

We study three budget-neutral reforms of the German tax and transfer system designed to improve work incentives for people with low incomes: a feasible flat tax reform that provides a basic income which is equal to the current level of the means tested unemployment benefit, and two alternative...

We quantify the importance of precautionary labor supply using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) for 2001-2012. We estimate dynamic labor supply equations augmented with a measure of wage risk. Our results show that married men choose about 2.5% of their hours of work or one week...