Employing panel data techniques, we investigate the macroeconomic and institutional determinants of inequality and poverty in the EU over the period 1994–2008. We pay particular attention to the effects of macroeconomic environment, social protection and labour market institutions. The...

Lea Immel prepared this study while she was working at the Research Group Taxation and Fiscal Policy at the ifo Institute. The study was completed in September 2020 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It consists of four distinct empirical...

In this paper, I study the distributional consequences of the German Hartz reforms, a set of four comprehensive labor market reforms implemented in Germany between 2003 and 2005. I exploit regional variation in the intensity German counties were affected by the reforms to estimate the causal...

The Gini coefficient of labor earnings in Brazil fell by nearly a fifth between 1995 and 2012, from 0.50 to 0.41. The decline in earnings inequality was even larger by other measures, with the 90-10 percentile ratio falling by almost 40 percent. Although the conventional explanation of a falling...

The gender income gap is large and well documented for many countries. Recent research shows that it is mainly driven by differences in working patterns between men and women, but also by wage differences. The tax-benefit system cushions the gender income gap by redistributing between men and...

Using new data from the Understanding Society: COVID 19 survey collected in April 2020, we show how the aggregate shock caused by the pandemic affects individuals across the distribution. The survey collects data from existing members of the Understanding Society panel survey who have been...