Topic Inequality

Unveiling Wealth and Income Inequalities

The 2-day workshop, supported by the German Research Foundation, will bring together researchers to discuss and exchange ideas on critical issues surrounding wealth and income inequalities. Featured presentations will highlight work on a wide range of topics, including savings and wealth accumulation, measuring income inequality and poverty, long-run dynamics of income and wealth distributions,...

Higher fossil fuel prices and a climate dividend: burdens on and relief of households

The Gender (Tax) Gap in Parental Transfers. Evidence from administrative inheritance and gift tax data.

This study examines how inheritance and gift tax systems in combination with gendered parental transfer behavior strengthen gender wealth inequalities. Gender differences in transfers can be reproduced if men benefit differently than women from tax exemptions. This might happen when men and women receive different types of assets where only some are tax exempted. To investigate gendered parental...

Livestream: Social Mobility as a Key to Success for Economic Transformation and Reform

Social mobility and equal opportunity are key to thriving societies and economies. In the aftermath of the pandemic and in the context of increasing prices, calls for policymakers to address social and economic inequalities are intensifying. The recently launched Observatory on Social Mobility and Equal Opportunity not only brings together all OECD data points, but also displays the impact of...

Wealth policy instruments and wealth inequality

Development of a dynamic framework to depict and compare the effects of wealth policy instruments in the short, medium, and long term. Among the examined instruments are a general wealth tax, a social inheritance, and a social dividend.

The role of inherited wealth for wealth inequality in Germany

In this project, a top-corrected wealth distribution is estimated on the basis of the inheritance tax statistics and the SOEP. We analyze the concentration of wealth, the portfolios of the wealthy, the importance of inherited wealth, the gender inheritance gap and the gender wealth gap as well as reactions to inheritance taxation.

Immigration, Female Labour Supply and Local Cultural Norms

We study the local evolution of female labour supply and cultural norms in West Germany in reaction to the sudden presence of East Germans who migrated to the West after reunification. These migrants grew up with high rates of maternal employment, whereas West German families mostly followed the traditional breadwinner-housewife model. We find that West German women increase their labour supply and ...

New DIW Berlin Model Can Nowcast the Current Income Distribution; Inequality Likely to Slightly Increase in 2023

The unequal distribution of labor income in Germany is a hotly debated topic among policymakers and the general public alike. However, the relevant data for calculating the distribution is usually available with a delay of sometimes over two years. Accordingly, previous studies have only been about the past, not the current, distribution. Generally, the current development of the income distribution ...

Hicks in HANK: Fiscal Responses to an Energy Shock

The distributional and disruptive effects of energy supply shocks are potentially large. We study the effectiveness of alternative fiscal responses in a two-country HANK model that we calibrate to the euro area. Energy subsidies can stabilize the domestic economy, but are fiscally costly and generate adverse spillovers to the rest of the monetary union: What the subsidizing country gains, the other ...

Understanding the Impact of Education and Environmental Policy on Human Capital Formation

In dieser Dissertation werden verschiedene Möglichkeiten analysiert, wie politische Entscheidungsträger die Bildung von Humankapital und die Entstehung von Ungleichheiten in diesem Bereich beeinflussen können. Sie besteht aus vier in sich abgeschlossenen empirischen Forschungsarbeiten, die jeweils einen Beitrag zur bildungsökonomischen Analyse der Bildung von Humankapital leisten. Unter Berücksichtigung ...