Statements by high-profile political figures and supporting academic research have led to a common perception of worsening job prospects for low-wage workers in the US. In this paper, we show that since the early 1980s there has been a decline in the share of workers earning low wages. This...

Die Ungleichheit der Lohneinkommen in Deutschland verschärft sich seit geraumer Zeit deutlich. Umso mehr muss zumindest die Gleichheit der Chancen in unserer Gesellschaft gewährleistet sein. Die Höhe des Einkommens sollte - aus gesellschaftlichen wie ökonomischen Gründen - von der...

This paper examines the similarity in the association between earnings of sons and fathers in Germany and the United States. It relaxes the log-linear functional form imposed in most studies of the intergenerational earnings association. Theory implies the relationship between earnings of...

The United States is often considered to be more free-wheeling and mobile than Germany; however, previous cross-national studies of income mobility find the oppositeis true. This paper investigates these surprising results and finds that they are confirmed when income mobility is measured by...

This volume was prepared by Jens Ruhose while he was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in December 2014 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes four self-contained chapters that contribute to the understanding of the...

This assessment of the present context for evolving socio-economic patterns and trends in the United States is intended to support consideration of prospects for gains in income shares among the lower income population, recognising that the United States is: a very large heterogeneous...

In this paper, the amount of income redistribution in the United States, the European Union, and Switzerland is compared and empirically related to economic, political, and behavioral determinants elaborated in the literature. Lying in between the two poles, Switzerland provides unique evidence...

This paper formulates a structural dynamic programming model of preschool investment choices of altruistic parents and then empirically estimates the structural parameters of the model using the NLSY79 data. The paper finds that preschool investment significantly boosts cognitive and...

This paper examines whether rising house prices immediately prior to children entering their college years impacts their intergenerational earnings mobility and/or educational outcomes. Higher house prices provide homeowners, especially liquidity constrained ones, with additional funding to...

Much of America's promise is predicated on the existence of economic mobilitythe idea that people are not limited or defined by where they start, but can move up the economic ladder based on their efforts and accomplishments. Family income mobilitychanges in individual families' real incomes...