German history over the past 125 years has been turbulent. Marked by two world wars, revolutions and major regime changes, as well as a hyperinflation and three currency reforms, expropriations and territorial divisions, it provides unique insights into the role of country-specific shocks in...

We estimate the size of inheritance and gift flows in Germany for selected years over the last century, applying the methodology used by Piketty (2011) for France and combining national accounts, tax statistics and survey data (mainly the German Socio-Economic Panel, SOEP). The data clearly...

Research on wealth inequality usually focuses on real and financial assets, while pension wealth – the present value of future pension entitlements from public and company pension schemes – receives little attention. This is astonishing, given that pension plans play an important role for...

In general, poverty measures are estimated by applying income information. However, only using income data for calculating relative poverty might lead to an incomplete view. For example, a household can be under a poverty threshold even if a household member owns real estate or equity. In this...

Objective: To document gender differences in how economic wealth changes following the dissolution of marriage and cohabitation in Germany. Background: Wealth can be an important resource to deal with the adverse economic consequences of union dissolution. Marital property regimes usually ensure...

We provide levels of, compositions of, and inequalities in household augmented wealth - defined as the sum of net worth and pension wealth - for two countries: the United States and Germany. Pension wealth makes up a considerable portion of household wealth: about 48% in the United States and...

The definition and operationalization of wealth information in population surveys and the corresponding microdata requires a wide range of more or less normative assumptions. However, the decisions made in both the pre- and post-data-collection stage may interfere considerably with the...

Im fünften Armuts- und Reichtumsbericht der Bundesregierung wurde darauf hingewiesen, dass die Datenlage im Bereich hoher Vermögen unzureichend sei (BMAS, 2017). Zur Verbesserung der Datenlage haben wir eine neue Sampling-Strategie entwickelt und im Feld implementiert. In der gezogenen...

In numerous industrialized countries the demographic change erodes the financial basis of traditional pay-as-you-go pension systems. To compensate for decreasing statutory pensions, many governments incentivize private saving by meansof subsidized retirement plans. In this context, Germany...

Closely following recent innovations in the literature on the multidimensional measurement of poverty, this paper provides similar measures for the top of the distribution using a dual cutoff method to identify individuals, who can be considered as rich in a multidimensional setting. We use this...