This paper provides empirical evidence of interregional risk sharing in reunified Germany. The focus is on two related questions: First, to what extent do private institutions and the public sector provide insurance against asymmetric shocks to individual regions? Second, to what extent does the...

Much of the U.S. labor economics literature asserts that U.S. wage income inequality increased in the last half of the 20th century. These papers point to two trends: 1) the increasing dispersion in U.S. wage incomes, and 2) the rapid growth in the relative frequency of large wage incomes of...

This paper provides empirical evidence of interregional risk sharing in reunified Germany. The focus is on two related questions: First, to what extent do private institutions and the public sector provide insurance against asymmetric shocks to individual regions? Second, to what extent does the...

We investigate to what extent convergence in production levels per worker has been achieved in Germany since unification. To this end, we model the distribution of GDP per employee across German districts using two-component normal mixtures. While in the first year after unification, the...

This paper analyses convergence in per capita gross regional product of Russia’s regions during the period 1995-2010, when regional data are available. Using a panel regression framework we find no evidence for beta-convergence. Instead we find divergence, which is, however, attenuated over...

The purpose of our paper is to derive instructive analytics on how to account for differentials in demographic variables, in particular mortality, when performing welfare comparisons over time. The idea is to apply various ways of 'correcting' estimated income distribution measures for 'sample...