Auf der Basis der Einkommensteuerdaten lassen sich Angaben zu Selbstständigen sowie zu Gründungen nach Tätigkeitsarten ermitteln. Bis zum Jahr 2007 ist die Anzahl der Personen mit selbstständigen Tätigkeiten auf 6,8 Millionen gestiegen. Davon entfallen rund eine Million auf...

I propose two new tests of Falk and Knell's (2004) prediction that individuals' reference income increases with ability. To overcome the difficulty that the reference incomeis not observed in existing large data sets, I extend Falk and Knell's model to establish a link between immigrants'...

Empirical analyses of economic inequality, poverty, and mobility in Germany are, to an increas-ing extent, using microdata from the German Federal Statistical Office's contribution to the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) as well as data from the German...

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...

A series of studies have suggested that changes in others' income may be perceived differently in post-transition and capitalist societies. This paper draws on the German Socio-economic Panel Study (SOEP) matched with micro-marketing indicators of population characteristics in very tightly drawn...

German family policy underwent a reform in 2007, when the new instrument of "Elterngeld" replaced the previous "Erziehungsgeld". The transfer programs differ in various dimensions. We study the effects on the labor supply of young mothers, by comparing behavior before and after the reform. We...

Deploying data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) 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 to...

Few theories in the social sciences have gained more widespread acceptance than Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - despite a lack of conclusive empirical evidence. At the core of Weber's theory lies a connection between Protestantism and attitudes toward work. Using...