In view of rising wage inequality and increasing poverty, the introduction of a legal minimum wage has recently become an important policy issue in Germany. We analyze the distributional effects of the introduction of a nationwide legal minimum wage of 7.5 per hour on the basis of a...

We analyze the top tail of the wealth distribution in Germany, France, Spain, and Greece based on the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). Since top wealth is likely to be underrepresented in household surveys we integrate the big fortunes from rich lists, estimate a Pareto...

We present evidence from a repeated survey on risky asset holdings carried out on a representative sample of the German population six times between April and June 2020. Given the size of the Covid-19 shock, we find little evidence of portfolio rebalancing in April 2020. In May, however,...