Empirically, the income share is procyclical for the low-income groups and acyclical for the top 5%. We find that business cycle models should consider overlapping generations and elastic labor supply in order to replicate this finding

We estimate household equivalence scales using income satisfaction data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. We extend previous studies applying this approach by taking reference income into account. This allows separating needs-based from reference effects in the determination of income...

We propose a dynamic general equilibrium model with human capital accumulation to evaluate the economic consequences of compulsory services (such as military draft or social services). Our analysis identifies a so far ignored dynamic cost arising from distortions in time allocation over the...

We study the effect of a declining labor force on the incentives to engage in labor-saving technical change and ask how this effect is influenced by institutional characteristics of the pension scheme. When labor is scarcer it becomes more expensive and innovation investments that increase labor...

İmrohoroğlu, İmrohoroğlu and Joines [1995, A life-cycle analysis of Social Security, Economic Theory, vol. 6, 83-114] show that the optimal replacement ratio of the pay-as-you-go public pension system in the US economy amounts to 30%. We extend their analysis to a model that 1) replicates...

We study the effect of a declining labor force on the incentives to engage in labor-saving technical change and ask how this effect is influenced by institutional characteristics of the pension scheme. When labor is scarcer it becomes more expensive and innovation investments that increase labor...

Ýmrohoroðlu, Ýmrohoroðlu and Joines [1995, A life-cycle analysis of Social Security, Economic Theory, vol. 6, 83-114] show that the optimal replacement ratio of the payas-you-go public pension system in the US economy amounts to 30%. We extend their analysis to a model that 1) replicates the...

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...

In this paper we conduct a counterfactual analysis and estimate the quantitative importance of demand and supply effects on wage inequality in Germany using a dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of the Auerbach-Kotlikoff (1987) type. Specifically, the methodological contribution...

Progress in closing differences in many objective outcomes for blacks relative to whites has slowed, and even worsened, over the past three decades. However, over this period the racial gap in well-being has shrunk. In the early 1970s data revealed much lower levels of subjective well‐being...