Previous research has found that subjective well-being (SWB) is lower for individuals classified as being in poverty. Using panel data for 39,239 individuals living in Germany from 2005-2013, we show that people’s SWB is negatively correlated with the state-level poverty ratio while...

Youth is one of the phases in the life-cycle when some of the most decisive life transitions take place. Entering the labour market or leaving parental home are events with important consequences for the economic well-being of young adults. In this paper, the interrelationship between...

Entrepreneurs and freelancers, the self-employed, commonly are characterized as not only to be relatively rich in income but also as to be rich in time because of their time-sovereignty in principle. Our introducing study scrutinises these results and notions about the well-being situation of...

Household survey data provide a rich information set on income, household context and demographic variables, but tend to under report incomes at the very top of the distribution. Administrative data like tax records offer more precise information on top incomes, but at the expense of household...

We analyse the convergence and heterogeneity of living standards between East and West Germany since unification. Based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), we compare total individual income of permanent adult residents, including retirees and the unemployed, of East and West...

Do EU citizens have an increased opportunity to improve their position in the distribution of lifetime earnings? To what extent does earnings mobility work to equalize/disequalize longerterm earnings relative to cross-sectional inequality and how does it differ across the EU? Our basic...

We analyze the potential influence of a number of factors on the distribution of equivalized net incomes in Germany over the period 2005/2006 to 2010/11. While income inequality considerably increased in the years before 2005/2006, this trendwas stopped after 2005/2006. Among many other factors,...

Welfare-oriented analyses of economic outcome measures such as income and wealth generally rest on the assumption of pooled and equally shared resources among all household members. Yet the lack of individual-level data hampers the distribution of income and wealth within the ousehold context....

There is by now a vast number of studies which document a sharp increase in crosssectional wage inequality during the 2000s. It is often assumed that this inequality is of a "permanent nature" which in turn is used as an argument calling for government intervention. We examine these claims using...

I propose a method to decompose changes in income inequality into the contributions of policy changes, wage rate changes, and population changes while considering labor supply reactions. Using data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), I apply this method to decompose the increase in income...