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...

This paper presents empirical evidence on the distributional impact of public higher edu- cation through analysis of a cross-sectional view of West Germany in 1997. In contrast to a widely-held hypothesis in economics, our findings do not show evidence for a regressive im- pact. The use of a...

For more than 150 years, many economists have assumed public subsidies on higher education to have a regressive distributional effect. The German debate on this issue is kept alive by many empirical studies. Most of them confirm the thesis of a \"perverse distribution of income\" (Milton...