In many economic models a central variable of interest is lifetime or permanent income which is not observed in survey data sets and typically proxied by annual income information. To assess the quality of such approximations, we use a unique source of lifetime earnings - the German pension...

This paper analyses worker transitions on the German labour market derived from different data sources. These include the two German micro data sets which provide high-frequency observations on workers' employment and unemployment histories: the German Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP) and the IAB...

Using representative survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) for 2006, we show that the magnitude of such health inequality measures as the concentration index (CI) depends crucially on the underlying health measure. The highest degree of inequality is found when...