The case of German reunification has been subject to extensive research on earnings inequality and labor market integration. however, little is known about the development of equality of opportunity (EOp) in East and West Germany after 1990.Using German micro data, we empirically analyze how...

This paper examines the wage effects of different types of career interruptions. We consider the timing and duration of non-employment spells by exploiting an administrative data set of German social security accounts (IAB employment sample) supplemented with information on the employees' entire...

Empirical research has unambiguously shown that married men receive higher wages than unmarried, whereas a wage premium for cohabiters is not as evident yet. Our paper exploits the observed difference between the marital and the cohabiting wage premium in Germany and thus provides new insights...

Using a unique dataset of German members of parliament with information on total earnings including outside income, this paper analyzes the politicians' wage gap (PWG). After controlling for observable characteristics as well as accounting for selection into politics, we find a positive PWG...

We analyze the wage effects of employment breaks of women entering motherhood using a novel within-firm matching approach where mothers’ wages upon return to the job are compared with those of their female colleagues within the same firm. Using an administrative German data set we investigate...

With flexible work time arrangements firms can quickly adjust to demand fluctuations, while employees may benefit from more time sovereignty. Depending on the specific type of arrangement the accompanying wage effects are ambiguous and have rarely been analyzed. According to the theory of...

Many studies have estimated the effect of circumstances on income acquisition. Perhaps surprisingly, the fraction of inequality attributable to circumstances is usually quite small - in the advanced democracies, on the order of 20%. One reason for this is the lack of data on circumstance...

Previous estimates of unfair inequality of opportunity (IOp) are only lower bounds because of the unobservability of the full set of endowed circumstances beyond the sphere of individual responsibility. In this paper, we suggest a new estimator based on a fixed effects panel model which...