This paper uncovers ongoing trends in idiosyncratic earnings volatility across generations by decomposing residual earnings auto-covariances into a permanent and a transitory component. We employ data on complete earnings life cycles for prime age men born 1935 through 1974 that covers earnings...

Einkommensungleichheit wird zumeist im Hinblick auf ihre aktuelle Entwicklung betrachtet. Eine längerfristige Perspektive bietet die Möglichkeit, die Einkommenssituation der heutigen Generation mit der ihrer Elterngeneration zu vergleichen. Mithilfe eines neuartigen Datensatzes wird hier...

This paper documents the magnitude, pattern, and evolution of lifetime earnings inequality in Germany. Based on a large sample of earning biographies from social security records, we show that the intra-generational distribution of lifetime earnings of male workers has a Gini coefficient around...

This paper uncovers ongoing trends in idiosyncratic earnings volatility across generations by decomposing residual earnings auto-covariances into a permanent and a transitory component. We employ data on complete earnings life cycles for prime age men born 1935 through 1974 that covers earnings...

Einkommensungleichheit wird zumeist im Hinblick auf ihre aktuelle Entwicklung betrachtet. Eine längerfristige Perspektive bietet die Möglichkeit, die Einkommenssituation der heutigen Generation mit der ihrer Elterngeneration zu vergleichen. Mithilfe eines neuartigen Datensatzes wird hier...

This paper documents the magnitude, pattern, and evolution of lifetime earnings inequality in Germany. Based on a large sample of earning biographies from social security records, we show that the intra-generational distribution of lifetime earnings of male workers has a Gini coefficient around...

Income inequality is usually considered in terms of its current development. A long-term perspective allows us to compare the income situation of today’s generation with that of their parents. For the first time ever, we have measured the inequality of wages and salaries earned over an entire...

We provide a concise introduction to a household-panel data infrastructure that provides the international research community with longitudinal data of private households in Germany since 1984: the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). We demonstrate the comparative strength of the SOEP data in...