Empirical evidence on distributional preferences shows that people do not judge inequality as problematic per se but that they take the underlying sources of income differences into account. In contrast to this evidence, current measures of inequality do not adequately reflect these normative...

In view of rising wage and income inequality, the introduction of a legal minimum wage has recently become an important policy issue in Germany. We analyze the distributional effects of a nationwide legal minimum wage of 7.50 € per hour on the basis of a microsimulation model which accounts...

Single parents and unmarried couples are increasingly replacing the traditional nuclear family. This paper investigates if the greater variety in living arrangements contributes to increased resource disparities among children in Germany. Children in single parent families are disadvantaged in...

The paper proposes a two-country general equilibrium model of endogenous growth and trade between two regions, North and South, with different environmental standards. Pollution is a by-product of consumption and in order to abate it the northern region unilaterally imposes a green tax on...

The paper reviews the theory of the measurement of poverty. The axiomatic theory is described and the axiomatic properties of poverty indexes are related to assumptions on the functional form of the poverty index function. The notion of poverty ordering is then introduced and followed by a...

This paper examines different approaches to the measurement of multidimensional inequality and poverty. First, it outlines three aspects preliminary to any multidimensional study: the selection of the relevant dimensions; the indicators used to measure them; and the procedures for their...

In view of rising concerns over increasing inequality in the European Union since the financial crisis, this study provides an inequality decomposition of the overall European income distribution by country. The EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions are our empirical basis. Inequality...

In this empirical paper we analyze the link between homeownership across cohorts and the net wealth distribution. In particular we are interested in the effect of the pattern of ownership across cohorts. Given that wealth accumulates over the life-cycle and that owners are wealthier than...

Mobility of top incomes matters for both the openness of the income elite and the share of total income that this group receives. It is thus an important complement information to the growing snapshot literature on top income concentration. I use microlevel panel data of German income tax files...

The objective of this essay is to study to what extent parents divide their estates unequally between their children and the determinants of this decision. We use a new dataset based on the estate reports for almost 70,000 Swedish widows, widowers, divorcees and unmarried individuals who died...