Much analysis in macroeconomics empirically addresses economy-wide incentives behind consumer/investment choices by using insights from the way a single representative household would behave. Heterogeneity at the micro level can jeopardize attempts to back up the representative consumer...

Micro-econometric intra-cohort profitability analyses of pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension contributions are rare. We use representative employment histories of a birth cohort of German PAYG pension insurants retiring in year 2005 to econometrically examine the determinants of the profitability of...

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 significance of...

Two conversion schemes are usually employed for assessing personal-income inequality from household equivalent incomes: to weight household units by size or by needs.Using data from the Luxembourg Income Study, we show the sensitivity of country inequality rankings to conversion schemes and...

In many federations, fiscal equalization schemes soften fiscal imbalances across the member states. Such schemes usually imply that the member states internalize only a small fraction of the additional tax revenue from an expansion of the state-specific tax bases, while the remainder of the...

Die flächendeckende Einführung des gesetzlichen Mindestlohns ist eine bedeutende Intervention in den Arbeitsmarkt und die marktwirtschaftliche Ordnung in Deutschland. Motiviert ist die gesetzliche Änderung vor allem sozialpolitisch: Die Einkommenssituation von Niedrigeinkommensbeziehern soll...

The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study is a rich resource for sociologists, mainly because it offers direct measures of respondents’ contexts. The SOEP data provide (i) information retrieved from individuals themselves, (ii) direct information retrieved from their parents, partners, and...

According to calculations based on the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study, the proportion of middle-income group in Germany fell by six percentage points from 1991 to 2013, taking it to 54 percent. Germany is not the only country to have experienced such a downturn, however. Analyses of the...

Die Gruppe der Bezieher eines mittleren Einkommens ist in Deutschland von 1991 bis 2013 um sechs Prozentpunkte auf 54 Prozent zurückgegangen. Das zeigen Berechnungen auf Basis des Sozio-oekonomischen Panels (SOEP). Damit steht Deutschland nicht allein, denn vergleichbare Analysen für die USA...