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...

The objective of the study is to investigate the changing role of explanatory factors of wealth and the gender wealth gap in Germany over the period 2002-2012 using individual level microdata from the German Socio-Economic Panel. The authors apply distributional decomposition methods and focus...

There has been a universal statutory minimum wage in Germany for a good four years, but many employees still do not receive it. This is the finding of new calculations based on the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), which have updated noncompliance with the minimum wage for 2017. Even conservative...

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...

Using representative and consistent microdata from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) from 1985-2007, we illustrate that capital income (CI = return on financial investments) and imputed rent (IR = return on investments in owner-occupied housing) have become increasingly important...

The number of employed persons in Germany has grown by over five million since 2000, in part due to an increase in immigration. This development is reflected in private household income, which has increased by 12 percent over the same period. Since 2013, all income groups have been benefiting...

Despite the booming German labor market, wage inequality is still a relevant issue. In the present study, the authors report on the changes in wages and their distribution between 1992 and 2016. In addition to real contractual gross hourly wages, we closely examined gross monthly and annual...

Between 1991 and 2015, the real disposable, needs-adjusted income of persons in private households in Germany rose by 15 percent on average. The majority of the population has benefited from the growth in real income, but the groups at the lower end of the income distribution have not....