Atypische Engelkurven-Verläufe zeigen, dass die in der Faktisch Anonymisierten Lohn- und Einkommensteuerstatistik 1998 (FAST) verzeichneten steuerrechtlich definierten Einkommensaggregate ein verzerrtes Bild vom Lebensstandard der Zensenten geben. Wir zeigen, dass f¨ur einen überwiegenden...

We employ German Sample Survey Income data to examine income inequality and the financial situation of elderly citizens for the period from 1978 to 2003, focussing on differences between retired and non-retired elderly and between elderly with residence in the Old and the New German Laender....

We study inter-temporal changes in poverty for Germany from year 1978 to 2003, and we employ the bootstrap method to test for statistical significance of results. All results are decomposed by household type and region. Poverty estimates are particularly high for single parents. Most striking,...

We outline a procedure for combining six cross-sections of the German Sample Survey of Income and Expenditure, and discuss potential pitfalls of such a venture. Particularly, we investigate the consequences of a major break in the survey design for inter-temporal comparisons of expenditure...

Income-expenditure surveys typically provide incomes on the household level. As households can differ in size and needs, a reliable assessment of inequality in living standards, therefore, necessitates the conversion of the original heterogeneous into an artificial quasi-homogeneous population....

In many countries organized as federations, fiscal-equalization schemes have been implemented to mitigate vertical or horizontal imbalances. Such schemes usually imply that the member states of the federation can only partly internalize marginal tax revenue before redistribution. Aside from this...

In view of rising concerns over increasing inequality in the European Union since the financial crisis, this study provides an inequality decomposition of the overall European income distribution by country. The EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions are our empirical basis. Inequality...

We employ a rich 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...

We analyze the distributive justice of the combined burden of taxes, social security contributions and public transfers on employee households. In order to investigate whether the treatment of families by the aggregate tax-benefit system can be regarded as 'fair', we compare the equivalent...

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...