Following a Federal Constitutional Court sentence, wealth tax has not been levied in Germany since 1997. A possible revival has since regularly been the subject of political debate. Several German federal states are currently preparing to submit a bill to the Bundesrat. A basic scenario...

The idea of higher wealth taxes to finance the mounting public debt in the wake of the financial crises is gaining ground in several OECD countries. We evaluate the revenue and distributional effects of a one-time capital levy on personal net wealth that is currently on the German political...

2013 will see a significant increase in the surcharge stipulated by the Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) and paid by power consumers to promote the use of renewable energies. This will equate to a rise in the share of private households' consumer spending on electricity from around 2.3 percent...

We calculate the expected incidence of the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU-ETS) using industry and household-level data. By combining data on direct CO2 emissions by production sector from the German Environmental Account with the German Input-Output Accounts, we calculate the CO2...

Standard theory of intertemporal choice predicts that people smooth out life-cycle changes in income by borrowing and saving, such that their standard of living in any given year depends more on lifetime income than on that year’s income. Yet, contemporary empirical studies of income...

This paper is concerned with the problem of ranking and quantifying the extent of deprivation exhibited by multidimensional distributions, where the multiple attributes in which an individual can be deprived are represented by dichotomized variables. To this end we first aggregate deprivation...

Do market-orientated economies with relatively large cross-sectional levels of inequality have higher income mobility and therefore less permanent inequality? To answer this question, we introduce a formal representation of income mobility as an equalizer of permanent income. The proposed...

The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of including the value of public health care, longterm care, education and childcare on estimates of income inequality and financial poverty in 23 European countries. The valuation of public services and the identification of target groups rely on...

This paper is concerned with concepts – poverty, inequality, affluence, and polarization – that are typically treated in different literatures. Our aim here is to place them within a common framework and to identify the way in which different classes of income transfers contribute to...

This paper is concerned with the measurement of the extent of deprivation when the available information is given by a set of dichotomous variables, and the data are summarised by the count distribution, i.e. the distribution of the number of dimensions in which an individual suffers from...