The book ”Capital in the 21. Century” by Piketty (2014) marked the peak of attention for the topic of income inequality and spread awareness on the importance of ongoing research. During my master thesis, I had worked on decomposition methods for labor earnings. Motivated by this development...

Wage mobility reduces the persistence of wage inequality. We develop a framework to quantify the contribution of employer-to-employer movers to aggregate wage mobility. Using three decades of German social security data, we find that inequality increased while aggregate wage mobility decreased....

"Wealth exists only for the benefit of mankind. It cannot be measured adequately in yards or in tons, nor as equivalent as so many ounces of gold; its true measure lies only in the contribution it makes to human well-being. Now, when bricks and sand and lime and wood are built up into a house,...