Summary Based on six harmonized cross-sections of the German Sample Survey of Income and Expenditure, we study inter-temporal changes in poverty from year 1978 to 2003. Results are decomposed by region and household types, and the bootstrap method is applied to test for the statistical...

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...