When comparing tax benefit systems across Europe, Germany is usually regarded as a country with a high level of taxes and contributions which is often seen as a main challenge for the economic performance of the welfare state. In this paper, we analyse the progressivity and redistribution...

In Germany, there is an ongoing debate about how to increase the efficiency of the social security system and especially its financing. The aim of this paper is to simulate different financing systems for Germany. The introduction of a Liberal British or the Southern Greek financing system...

We provide a comprehensive analysis of income inequality and income dynamics for Germany over the last two decades. Combining personal income tax and social security data allows us - for the first time - to offer a complete picture of the distribution of annual earnings in Germany. We find that...

Income inequality in Germany has been continually increasing during the past 20 years. One cause of this development, among others, could be structural shifts in household formation due to long‐term societal trends. These affect per capita incomes, which has repercussions for the income...

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...

When comparing tax benefit systems across Europe, Germany is usually regarded as a country with a high level of taxes and contributions which is often seen as a main challenge for the economic performance of the welfare state in terms of growth and unemployment. Especially the progressive...

We provide a comprehensive analysis of income inequality and income dynamics for Germany over the last two decades. Combining personal income tax and social security data allows us for the first time to offer a complete picture of the distribution of annual earnings in Germany. We find that...

Previous estimates of inequality of opportunity (IOp) are lower bounds because of the unobservability of the full set of endowed characteristics beyond the sphere of individual responsibility. Knowing the true size of unfair IOp, however, is important for the acceptance of (some) inequality and...