This study provides new evidence on top income shares in Germany from the period of industrialization to the present …. Income concentration was high in the nineteenth century, dropped sharply after World War I and during the hyperinflation … II, German top income shares returned to 1920s levels. The German pattern stands in sharp contrast to developments in …

Most methods for the analysis of distributional change rely on the changes in the income of a particular group of … standard against a richer group, thereby capturing a notion of change in relative income, which embodies the influence of … others' wellbeing on the judgment of the group's own situation. The indices, and related relative income change (RIC) curves …

-year earnings. We do this by examining income smoothing based on pseudo fiscal years. For each firm, we create pseudo-year earnings … the earnings volatility of the firm's own reported fiscal year. To the extent managers use accruals to reduce annual …-year earnings. We find that this measure of income smoothing behaves as expected in a variety of cross-sectional tests. Moreover, we …

"We consider a setting in which insiders have information about income that outside shareholders do not, but property … rights ensure that outside shareholders can enforce a fair payout. To avoid intervention, insiders report income consistent … with outsiders' expectations based on publicly available information rather than true income, resulting in an observed …