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...

This paper studies the employment and reallocation effects of minimum wages in Germany in a search-and-matching model with endogenous job search effort and vacancy posting, multiple employment levels, a progressive tax-transfer system, and worker and firm heterogeneity. I find that minimum wages...

This paper studies whether the interplay of social comparisons in housing and rising income inequality contributed to the household debt boom in the US between 1980 and 2007. We develop a tractable macroeconomic model with general social comparisons in housing to show that changes in the...

We study whether gender-based favoritism impedes women’s career progression using data from a European multinational corporation. Leveraging manager reassignments, we show that manager gender does not affect gender differences, neither in wage growth nor in promotion rates. Remarkably, this...

This paper qualifies the view of pronounced overpricing of sovereign bonds for the so-called GIIPS countries during the financial crisis. We use annual data for 21 OECD countries from 1980 to 2012. As opposed to related studies, our data set allows us to contrast the pricing of macroeconomic...

We develop a novel approach integrating epidemiological and economic models that allows databased simulations during a pandemic. We examine the economically optimal opening strategy that can be reconciled with the containment of a pandemic. The empirical evidence is based on data from Germany...

We develop a theory of tax reforms for a setting with multi-dimensional heterogeneity amongst taxpayers and multiple economic decisions that are all subject to fixed and variable costs. The theorems in this paper provide a complete characterization of the conditions under which Pareto- or...

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of the tax and transfer systems in the European Union and the US to act as an automatic stabilizer in the current economic crisis. We find that automatic stabilizers absorb 38 per cent of a proportional income shock in the EU, compared to 32 per cent in the...

Whether observed differences in redistributive policies across countries are the result of differences in social preferences or efficiency constraints is an important question that paves the debate about the optimality of welfare regimes. To shed new light on this question, we estimate labor...

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...