We show that measures of inequality of opportunity (IOP) fully consistent with Roemer (1998)'s IOP theory can be straightforwardly estimated by adopting a machine learning approach, and apply our novel method to analyse the development of IOP in Germany during the last three decades. Hereby, we...

Using German income distribution in 2009, this paper studies the redistributive and revenue effects of bracket creep under various inflation scenarios. We develop a tax micro-simulation model for the newly available Panel on Household Finance (PHF) data. The simulation yields an inverted...

In Germany, there is an ongoing debate about how to increase the efficiency of the social security system and especially its financing. The aim of this paper is to simulate different financing systems for Germany. The introduction of a Liberal British or the Southern Greek financing system...

This paper quantifies the economic well-being of different age groups and the extent of their reliance on incomes from public and private sources. The aim is to establish how social benefits, and the taxes needed to finance them, affect income levels and disparities across different age groups....

Deploying data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) we analyze the variability of individual earnings and equivalent household income. Permanent and transitory variances of male income over the period 1984-2008 are estimated for Old German Laender in order to determine their importance...

We analyze the distributive justice of the combined burden of taxes, social security contributions and public transfers on employee households. In order to investigate whether the treatment of families by the aggregate tax-benefit system can be regarded as "fair" we compare the equivalent...

Welfare states redistribute both between individuals (inter-individual redistribution) reducing annual, cross-sectional inequality and over the lifecycle of an individual (intra-individual redistribution) insuring individuals against income risks in the long-term. But studies measuring...

Mobility of top incomes matters for both the openness of the income elite and the share of total income that this group receives. It is thus an important complement information to the growing snapshot literature on top income concentration. I use microlevel panel data of German income tax files...

The relationship between income inequality and polarization is an empirical fact: a change in equality might occur together with a change in polarization. At the same time, polarization might emerge while inequality remains constant. The outcome of this process entails relevant information about...