This paper examines the relationship between idiosyncratic risk in labour income and fluctuations in aggregate labour market quantities for Great Britain. We use data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) for 1991-2008 and from the BHPS sub-sample of Understanding Society for 2010-2014....

This paper studies the distribution of U.S. household income and wealth over the past seven decades. We introduce a newly compiled household-level dataset based on archival data from historical waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). Complementing recent work on top income and wealth...

We revisit the prominent finding that women's incomes are disproportionally often observed just below the income of their partner. So far, this bunching has been explained by couple formation or couples' labor market decisions. We propose an additional mechanism: income misreporting in surveys....

Negative income shocks can either be the consequence of risky choices or random events. A growing literature analyzes the role of responsibility for neediness for informal financial support of individuals facing negative income shocks based on randomized experiments. In this paper, we show that...

In early April 2020 we conducted a survey on a representative sample of more than 8,000 US households to study the effect of the coronavirus crisis on household income and retirement wealth, households’ expectations about the recovery, and the impact of the shock on individuals’ economic...

This paper establishes new evidence on the cyclical behaviour of household income risk in Great Britain and assesses the role of social insurance policy in mitigating against this risk. We address these issues using the British Household Panel Survey (1991-2008) by decomposing stochastic...

We use sizeable lottery prizes in Norwegian administrative panel data to characterize households' marginal propensities to consume (MPCs). Our main contribution is to document how MPCs vary with household characteristics and prize size, and how lottery prizes are spent and saved over time. We...

We provide a comprehensive analysis of income inequality and income dynamics for Germany over the last two decades. Combining personal income tax and social security data allows us - for the first time - to offer a complete picture of the distribution of annual earnings in Germany. We find that...

We present a simple dynamic model based on on-the-job human capital accumulation affecting the dynamic of wage rates and labor earnings. We show how these dynamics are determined by the interplay between the supply and demand sides of the labor market. The model can generate and explain the...

We propose that false beliefs about the own current economic status are an important factor for explaining populist attitudes. Along with the subjects’ receptiveness to right-wing populism, we elicit their perceived relative income positions in a representative survey of German households. We...