After the introduction in Section 2, we very briefly sketch out current theoretical and empirical developments in the social sciences. In our view, they all point in the same direction: toward the acute and increasing need for multidisciplinary longitudinal data covering a wide range of living...

The definition and operationalization of wealth information in population surveys and the corresponding microdata requires a wide range of more or less normative assumptions. However, the decisions made in both the pre- and post-data-collection stage may interfere considerably with the...

This paper explores the determinants of individual well-being as measured by self-reported levels of satisfaction with income. Making full use of the panel data nature of the German Socio-Economic Panel, we provide empirical evidence for well-being depending on absolute and on relative levels of...

Welfare-oriented analyses of economic outcome measures such as income and wealth generally rest on the assumption of pooled and equally shared resources among all household members. Yet the lack of individual-level data hampers the distribution of income and wealth within the ousehold context....

Using representative income and time use-data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we estimate non-monetary income advantages arising from home production and analyse their impact on economic inequality. As an alternative to existing measures, we propose a predicted wage approach based...

Using representative and consistent microdata from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) from 1985-2007, we illustrate that capital income (CI = return on financial investments) and imputed rent (IR = return on investments in owner-occupied housing) have become increasingly important...

We show that the choice of the welfare measure has a substantial impact on the degree of welfare-related health inequality. Combining various income and wealth measures with different health measures, we calculate 80 health concentration indices. The influence of the welfare measure is more...

Die 1990 eingeführte Wirtschafts- und Währungsunion der BRD mit der DDR und schließlich die deutsche Wiedervereinigung war und ist für jede Statistik, die versucht die Lebensverhältnisse in Ost und West zu vergleichen, eine große Herausforderung. In seinem einleitenden Teil dokumentiert...

Social security entitlements are a substantial source of wealth that grows in importance over the individual's lifecycle. Despite its quantitative relevance, social security wealth has been thus far omitted from wealth inequality analyses. In Germany, it is the lack of adequate micro data that...

The proportion of middle income earners in Germany has shrunk significantly in recent years: from 62 percent of the total population in the year 2000 to only 54 percent in 2006. Correspondingly, the proportion of the population at the margins of the income distribution has increased as well,...