This paper documents the magnitude, pattern, and evolution of lifetime earnings inequality in Germany. Based on a large sample of earning biographies from social security records, we show that the intra-generational distribution of lifetime earnings of male workers has a Gini coefficient around...

This study uses German social security records to provide novel evidence about the heterogeneity in life expectancy by lifetime earnings and, additionally, documents the distributional implications of this earnings-related heterogeneity. We find a strong association between lifetime earnings and...

Unter Verwendung des Sozio-oekonomischen Panels untersuchen wir, wie sich die Einkommensverteilung für Haushaltsgemeinschaften älterer Personen im Alter von 55 Jahren und älter seit der Wiedervereinigung entwickelt hat. Innerhalb dieser Gruppe unterscheiden wir zwischen...

Unter Verwendung des Sozio-oekonomischen Panels untersuchen wir, wie sich die Einkommensverteilung für Haushaltsgemeinschaften älterer Personen im Alter von 55 Jahren und älter seit der Wiedervereinigung entwickelt hat. Innerhalb dieser Gruppe unterscheiden wir zwischen...

For a representative sample of German taxpayers, atypical slopes of Engel curves imply fis-cal incomes to be a biased measure of taxpayers’ abilities to consume. Yet, we show that, in general, the dataset provides sufficient information for converting taxpayers’ fiscal incomes into economic,...

We employ a large sample of individual tax returns data to simulate alternatives to the income tax reform introduced in Germany by the governmental coalition of Social Democrats and Greens in 1998. We characterize three reforms that would have been fiscally equivalent to the actual one: a...