We ask why working hours in the rich world have not declined more sharply or even risen at times since the early 1980s, despite a steady increase in productivity, and why they vary so much across rich countries. We use an internationally comparable database on working hours (Bick et al., 2019)...

Der Artikel diskutiert den Zusammenhang von zunehmender Einkommensungleichheit, Finanzialisierung und makroökonomischen Ungleichgewichten im Vorfeld der weltweiten Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrise ab 2007. Neben den Fallbeispielen USA und Deutschland werden Ergebnisse aus modellgestützten...

We develop a three-country, stock-flow consistent macroeconomic model to study the effects of changes in both personal and functional income distribution on national current account balances. Each country has a household sector and a non-household (corporate) sector. The household sector is...

We analyse the link between income distribution and the current account through a descriptive analysis for the G7 countries and a series of panel estimations for the G7 countries and a larger sample of 20 countries for the period 1972-2007. We find that, firstly, rising personal inequality leads...

Household surveys like the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) notoriously underestimate the degree of income and wealth inequality at the upper end of the distribution. A new approach developed by Thomas Piketty and co-authors therefore analyses tax return data in an attempt at better measuring...

Freiwillige Haushaltbefragungen wie das Sozioökonomische Panel (SOEP) unterschätzen tendenziell die Ungleichheit von Einkommen und Vermögen. Die von Thomas Piketty und anderen etablierte Forschungsrichtung wertet daher zur Bestimmung der Ungleichheit am oberen Ende der Verteilung amtliche...

In this paper, we analyze how corporate sector behavior has affected national current account balances in a sample of 25 countries for the period 1980-2015. A consistent finding is that an increase (decrease) in corporate net lending leads to an increase (decrease) in the current account,...