In this paper we first document inequality trends in wages, hours worked, earnings, consumption, and wealth for Germany from the last twenty years. We generally find that inequality was relatively stable in West Germany until the German unification (which happened politically in 1990 and in our...

Using Afrobarometer survey data from 18 Sub-Saharan African countries, as well as macro data on the history of economic and political regimes, we investigate the individual determinants of preferences for state intervention and support of democracy, and analyze whether they are in line with...

higher job satisfaction than the employed, even after controlling for income and hours worked. However, there is a large amount of heterogeneity in this effect: while “independent types” experience a large increase in job satisfaction from being self-employed, “hierarchical types” even...

We document changes in female labor supply between 1983 and today in seven OECD countries. Based on micro data sets, we construct comparable measures of hours worked across time and space which incorporate both the extensive and intensive margins of female labor supply. We document trends in...

We use three different micro data sets, the European Labor Force Survey, the Current Population Survey, and the German Microcensus, to obtain annual hours worked for various demographic subgroups in the US and 18 European countries. One major difficulty in constructing annual hours from micro...

This paper sheds light on the specificity or transferability of human capital by analyzing the unique event of German Reunification. We explore whether the comparatively low labor productivity in the East is caused by the depreciation of human capital at reunification, or by unfavorable job...

Preferences for redistribution, as well as the generosities of welfare states, differ significantly across countries. In this paper, we test whether there exists a feedback process of the economic regime on individual preferences. We exploit the "experiment" of German separation and...

Die Riester-Rente ist nach der zunehmenden Etablierung als Altersvorsorgeprodukt wieder in der politischen Debatte. Konkret diskutiert wird zum einen eine Ausweitung des förderfähigen Personenkreises bis hin zur Variante einer allgemeinen staatlich geförderten privaten Altersvorsorge. Zum...

We exploit data on German households’ savings in life insurance products, the characteristics of life insurance products and the specific tax treatment of savings in life insurance products to assess the importance of different savings motives and the effectiveness of tax incentives. Our...