Deploying data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) we analyze the variability of individual earnings and equivalent household income. Permanent and transitory variances of male income over the period 1984-2008 are estimated for Old German Laender in order to determine their importance...

Are children better off than their parents? This highly debated question in politics and economics is investigated by analysing the trends in absolute and relative intergenerational labour income mobility for Germany and the US. High quality panel data is used for this purpose; the SOEP for...

This paper asks whether the gap in subjective happiness between spouses matters per se, i.e. whether it predicts divorce. We use three panel databases to explore this question. Controlling for the level of life satisfaction of spouses, we find that a higher satisfaction gap, even in the first...

A central motivating factor for studying price markups is their effect on consumer welfare. Reported estimates of (firm-level) price markups in the literature, however, are often focused on industry or cross-country comparisons. These treat different industries equally rather than based on how...

Theoretical models of the Kuznets Curve have been purely analytical with little contribution towards an understanding of the timing of the process and the presence of additional mechanisms affecting its timing. This paper proposes an agent-based version of Acemoglu and Robinson's model of the...

We show that measures of inequality of opportunity (IOP) fully consistent with Roemer (1998)'s IOP theory can be straightforwardly estimated by adopting a machine learning approach, and apply our novel method to analyse the development of IOP in Germany during the last three decades. Hereby, we...

The rational expectations assumption, e.g. in life-cycle models and portfolio-choice models, prescribes agents to have model-consistent beliefs and to avoid systematic prediction errors. In reality, justi cation and identification of expectations are nontrivial. One way to solve this problem is...

This paper employs a multidimensional approach for the measurement of well-being at the top of the distribution using German SOEP micro data. Besides income as traditional indicator for material well-being, we include health as a proxy for nonmaterial quality of life as well as self-reported...

The connections between the polarization of living conditions, social conflicts concerning the distribution of resources and the perception of social inequality in Germany will be picked out as a central theme. By means of empirical findings it becomes clear that the degree of inequality and...

Wage growth occurs almost exclusively in full-time work, whereas it is close to zero in part-time work. German women, when asked to predict their own potential wage outcomes, show severely biased expectations with strong over-optimism about the returns to part-time experience. We estimate a...