The recession the United States economy entered in December of 2007 is considered to be the most severe downturn the country has experienced since the Great Depression. The unemployment rate reached as high as 10.1 percent in October 2009 - the highest we have seen since the 1982 recession. In...

Using harmonized wealth data and a novel decomposition approach, we show that cohort effects exist in the income pro?les of asset and debt portfolios for a sample of European countries and the U.S. We ?nd that observable characteristics explain a sizable portion of the wealth participation gap...

Examining the effect of beauty on labor market outcomes has become a growing field of labor economics. In fact, the way the labor market rewards physical attractiveness has become an important underlying determinant of wage discrimination, as well as the gender wage gap. In this article, we...

While most studies on wealth inequality focus on the inequality between households, this paper examines the distribution of wealth within couples. For this purpose, we make use of unique individual level micro data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP).In married and cohabiting couples,...

We apply an innovative technique to allow for differential effects of physical appearance across the wage distribution, as traditional methods confound opposing effects. Counterfactual wage distributions constructed using distribution regression,show that unattractive women are more likely to...