This article deals with income advantages derived from owner occupied housing (Imputed Rent, IR) and their impact on the personal income distribution. Following a brief description of different methods with which to calculate IR in household surveys, we conduct a cross-national comparative study...

In many federations, fiscal equalization schemes soften fiscal imbalances across the member states. Such schemes usually imply that the member states internalize only a small fraction of the additional tax revenue from an expansion of the state-specific tax bases, while the remainder of the...

In many federations, fiscal equalization schemes soften fiscal imbalances across the member states. Such schemes usually imply that a member state internalizes only a small fraction of the additional tax revenue from an expansion of the state-specific tax base, while the remainder of the...

Two conversion schemes may be employed for assessing income inequality from household equivalent incomes: to weight household units by size or by needs. Using data from the Luxembourg Income Study, we show the sensitivity of country inequality rankings to conversion schemes and explain the...

Der vorliegende Beitrag zeigt die Möglichkeiten und Grenzen eines Versuchs, sechs Querschnitte der Einkommens- und Verbrauchsstichprobe (1978 bis 2003) intertemporal vergleichbar aufzubereiten. Insbesondere werden die Effekte eines Bruchs in der Erhebungsmethode auf die in den Querschnitten...

For a representative sample of German taxpayers, atypical slopes of Engel curves imply fis-cal incomes to be a biased measure of taxpayers’ abilities to consume. Yet, we show that, in general, the dataset provides sufficient information for converting taxpayers’ fiscal incomes into economic,...

We employ data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to examine the income distribution for elderly individuals since German unification. The elderly population, defined as people of age 55 and older, is decomposed by people resident in the Old and New Federal States. Further, we distinguish...

Based on six harmonized cross-sections of the German Sample Survey of Income and Expenditure, we study inter-temporal changes in poverty from year 1978 to 2003. Results are decomposed by region and household types, and the bootstrap method is applied to test for the statistical significance of...