The accepted view among psychologists and economists alike is that economic well-being has a statistically significant but only weak effect on happiness/subjective well-being (SWB). This view is based almost entirely on weak relationships with household income. The paper uses household economic...

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...

In this study the relation between satisfaction with life and affluent income is analyzed by using cross-sectional and longitudinal data. The data used in this publication were made available by the German Socio Economic Panel Study (SOEP) at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW...

The idea of higher wealth taxes to finance the mounting public debt in the wake of the financial crises is gaining ground in several OECD countries. We evaluate the revenue and distributional effects of a one-time capital levy on personal net wealth that is currently on the German political...

This paper employs a multidimensional approach for the measurement of well-being at the top of the distribution using German SOEP micro data. Besides income as traditional indicator for material well-being, we include health as a proxy for nonmaterial quality of life as well as self-reported...

Sowohl die Einkommensarmut als auch der Einkommensreichtum haben in Deutschland in den letzten Jahren deutlich zugenommen, zu Lasten der mittleren Einkommensgruppen. Reichtum sollte auch die Freiheit von materiellen Sorgen bedeuten. Trotz der Polarisierung der Einkommensverteilung hat der Anteil...

Im Verlauf der Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrise hat die Staatsverschuldung auch in Deutschland stark zugenommen. In Relation zum Bruttoinlandsprodukt (BIP) wird sie von 65 Prozent Ende 2007 auf voraussichtlich 75,5 Prozent Ende 2010 steigen. Das staatliche Nettovermögen (Vermögenswerte minus...