Investments in education are of great importance for the competitiveness of the German economy. In particular, early childhood education programs promise high returns - because children can benefit from them even years later and find it easier to acquire new skills. These are the results of...

Education is not financed solely by the taxpayer-many institutions and activities require payment of top-up fees, at the very least. This applies for instance to education and care services for children. A household's private expenditure on education depends largely on the families' available...

Education is not financed solely by the taxpayer—many institutions and activities require payment of top-up fees, at the very least. This applies for instance to education and care services for children. A household’s private expenditure on education depends largely on the families’...

Investments in education are of great importance for the competitiveness of the German economy. In particular, early childhood education programs promise high returns - because children can benefit from them even years later and find it easier to acquire new skills. These are the results of...

Studies indicating the development of household wealth in Germany are typically based on nominal values and do not take account of price rises and thus the actual purchasing power of those assets. DIW Berlin took inflation into account in a recent evaluation and concluded that the average net...

Inequality of disposable incomes in Germany has decreased slightly since its peak in 2005. However, this trend did not continue in 2011. The most important reasons for this were the inequality in market incomes, including capital incomes, which had increased again. Besides this finding, the...

The real disposable income of private households in Germany, accounting for inflation, rose by 12 percent between 1991 and 2014. This is what the present study based on data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) has shown. However, the trends varied greatly depending on income group. While the...

The presence of refugees in Germany and the challenges their integration poses have preoccupied the public for the past two years. According to the latest data of the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), many more people in Germany were concerned about migration and xenophobia last year than in 2013....

This report examines how income groups and forms of employment in Germany have changed in the past two decades. Since the mid-1990s, inequality in disposable household income in Germany has generally increased. This trend was in effect until 2005. While fewer people had disposable incomes in the...

According to calculations based on the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study, the proportion of middle-income group in Germany fell by six percentage points from 1991 to 2013, taking it to 54 percent. Germany is not the only country to have experienced such a downturn, however. Analyses of the...