Am 16. November 2007 hat der Bundestag mit der Mehrheit von Union und SPD die Verlängerung des Arbeitslosengeldes I (Alg I) für Ältere beschlossen. Mit dieser Verlängerung steigt die Bezugsdauer von Alg I für über 50-Jährige Arbeitslose mit mindestens 30 Beitragsmonaten auf 15 Monate,...

Die von der Bundesregierung von neun auf sechs Monate verkürzte Wehr- und Zivildienstzeit hat insbesondere bei den Sozial- und Wohlfahrtsverbänden zu einem kollektiven Aufschrei geführt. Mit dieser Verkürzung seien die Zivildienstleistenden nicht mehr sinnvoll einzusetzen, die...

Income inequality in Germany has been continuously increasing during the past 20 years. In general, this is understood as an increase in inequality of wages due to changes in bargaining power of employees. However, the role of changing household structure is widely neglected. Societal trends...

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...

It is widely believed that globalization affects the extent of employment and wage responses to economic shocks. To provide evidence for this, we analyze the effect of firms' exporting behavior on the elasticity of labor demand. Using rich, German administrative linked employer-employee panel...

How can retirement savings be increased? We explore a unique policy change in the context of the German pension system to study this question. As of 2005 (with a phase-in period between 2002-04), the German pension administration started to send out annual letters providing detailed and...

This paper estimates the incidence of corporate taxes on wages using a 20-year panel of German municipalities exploiting 6,800 tax changes for identification. Using event study designs and differences-in-differences models, we find that workers bear about half of the total tax burden....

The distributional consequences of the recent economic crisis are still broadly unknown. While it is possible to speculate which groups are likely to be hardest-hit, detailed distributional studies are still largely backward-looking due to a lack of real-time microdata. This paper studies the...