More than 25 years after German reunification, key economic indicators for households living in eastern German regions are still below the western German levels. This particularly holds for private net wealth, which reaches only about 40% of the western German level. However, a more granular...

This paper investigates the redistributive impact of private and public childcare provision and education on children's resources in Germany between 2009 and 2013. It takes account of the multidimensionality of children's needs and access to economic resources by applying an extended income...

Wie kann Vereinbarkeit von Beruf und Familie gelingen – und zwar sowohl bei Frau-en als auch bei Männern? Ziel des Forschungsprojektes "Betriebliche Gelingensbedin-gungen einer partnerschaftlichen Aufteilung von Erwerbs- und Familienarbeit" war es herauszufinden, unter welchen Bedingungen...

Whether couples pool their resources and behave like a unit or spend their income individually is crucial for social and tax policy. In this paper, I provide a test of the income pooling hypothesis using administrative cross-sectional survey data on expenditures and individual incomes of couple...

We use a unique dataset with bank clients’ security holdings for all German banks to examine how macroeconomic shocks affect asset allocation preferences of households and non-financial firms. Our analysis focuses on two alternative mechanisms which can influence portfolio choice: wealth...

We study information aggregation problems where to a set of measures a single measure of the same dimension is associated. The collection of measures could represent the beliefs of agents about the state of the world, and the aggregate would then represent the beliefs of the population....

Single parents and unmarried couples are increasingly replacing the traditional nuclear family. This paper investigates if the greater variety in living arrangements contributes to increased resource disparities among children in Germany. Children in single parent families are disadvantaged in...

Countries with high income inequality also show a strong association between parents ́and childrenś economic well-being; i.e. low intergenerational mobility. This study is the first to test this relationship in a between and within country setup, using harmonized micro data from 18 Latin...

Using harmonized household survey data, we analyse long run social mobility in the US, the UK, and Germany and test recent theories of multigenerational persistence of socio-economic status. In this country comparison setting we find evidence against Gregory Clark's "universal law of social...

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...