This study presents descriptive and causal evidence on the role of social environment for the formation of prosociality. In a first step, we show that socioeconomic status (SES) as well as the intensity of mother-child interaction and mothers' prosocial attitudes are systematically related to...

Stößt das neuartige Coronavirus auf Menschen, deren ökonomische Lage und/oder sozialer Status sich deutlich unterscheiden, weichen die gesundheitlichen Auswirkungen für die Betroffenen häufig stark voneinander ab. Infektions-, Morbiditäts- und Mortalitätsrisiken der einzelnen...

Kinder können sich die Verhältnisse, in denen sie aufwachsen, nicht aussuchen. Deshalb hat der Staat eine besondere Verpflichtung, gerade ärmeren Familien unter die Arme zu greifen und Bedingungen zu schaffen, die Kindern und Jugendlichen ein gutes Leben ermöglichen. Doch die Infrastrukturen...

This paper models the welfare consequences of social fragmentation arising from technological advance. We start from the premise that technological progress falls primarily on market-traded commodities rather than prosocial relationships, since the latter intrinsically require the expenditure of...

This paper models the welfare consequences of social fragmentation arising from technological advance. We start from the premise that technological progress falls primarily on market-traded commodities rather than prosocial relationships, since the latter intrinsically require the expenditure of...

Für eine Politik, die auf Wohlstand und soziale Mobilität abzielt, stellt die bestehende soziale und wirtschaftliche Ungleichheit eine anhaltende Herausforderung dar. Dabei wird Ungleichheit in der deutschen Bevölkerung vielfach falsch wahrgenommen: Sie wird zwar durchaus als Problem...

We provide a method to estimate resource shares - the fraction of total household expenditure allocated to each household member - using OLS estimation of Engel curves. The method is a linear reframing of the nonlinear model of Dunbar, Lewbel and Pendakur (2013), extended to allow single-parent...

Current levels of social and economic inequalities are an enduring challenge for policymakers concerned with sustaining high levels of prosperity and social mobility. Understanding which types of inequalities people in Germany regard as important is crucial. Using survey data, this paper...

Mit dem 6. Armuts- und Reichtumsbericht (ARB) kommt die Bundesregierung ihrer gesetzlichen Verpflichtung nach zur Mitte einer jeden Legislaturperiode dem Deutschen Bundestag Bericht über fundamentale Kennzahlen zur Entwicklung von Armut und Reichtum in Deutschland zu erstatten. In dieser...

We document new facts on the distribution of male fertility and its relationship with men's labor market outcomes. Using Norwegian registry data on all births since 1967, we show that rates of male childlessness in recent cohorts are 72% among the lowest five percent of earners but only 11%...

There is abundant evidence on individual preferences for policies that reduce national inequality, but only little evidence on preferences for policies addressing global inequality. To investigate the latter, we conduct a two-year, face-to-face survey experiment on a representative sample of...

How does economic inequality affect public spending on healthcare in democracies? Does this depend upon the demographic composition of the electorate? We build a multidimensional model of political decision-making with endogenous political parties to analyse such questions. Voters in our model...

This report examines how household incomes were changing in the UK up to the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic, and how other measures of household living standards have changed over the course of the pandemic. In particular, we use the latest official data covering years up to 2019-20 to provide a...

This article studies global distributions of capital and labor income among individuals in 2000 and 2016. By constructing a novel database covering approximately the 80% of the global output and the 60% of the world population, two major findings stand out. First, the world underwent a...

Both wages and needs-adjusted household income increased by ten percent between 2013 and 2018, benefiting all income groups. Wage inequality has been declining for many years and has now again reached the level of the early 2000s. At the same time, the low-wage sector shrank by two percentage...

After an economically tough start into the new millennium, Germany experienced an unprecedented employment boom after 2005 only stopped by the COVID-19 pandemic. Persistently high levels of inequality despite a booming labour market and drastically falling unemployment rates constituted a...

This paper examines how culture impacts within-couple gender inequality. Exploiting the setting of Germany's division and reunification, I compare child penalties of couples socialised in a more gender-egalitarian culture (East Germany) to those in a gender-traditional culture (West Germany)....

Subjective expected utility theory assumes that educational paths result from the interplay of primary effects - students' cognitive skills - and secondary effects - academic decisions regarding their educational future. We argue that thus far, the assignment of marks has not been accounted for...

[Background:] Physical and mental health are important markers of quality of life. Little is known about how they unfold in tandem in the last years of life. [Objective:] We take a life-course perspective to identify typical joint trajectories of functional limitations and depression in the last...

This study presents descriptive and causal evidence on the role of social environment for the formation of prosociality. In a first step, we show that socioeconomic status (SES) as well as the intensity of mother-child interaction and mothers' prosocial attitudes are systematically related to...

Context: Vocational education and training enables young people to quickly and effectively enter the labour market. To advance their careers and to develop their professional expertise even more, they must then further their education through higher vocational or higher academic education. In...

Highly mobile world citizens were among the first to be infected. Meanwhile, the virus affects everyone - yet not everybody is affected equally.

Access to further training among adults on the labor market is unequally distributed. In particular, workers in occupations that are likely to be replaced by machines in the future participate less in training. This is mainly because of the job tasks they conduct: workers conducting routine...

While some Latin American countries remain in the middle of the pandemic and their governments have been either unable or unwilling to do anything about it, civil society has begun to initiate a considerable number of digital democratic innovations.

This paper develops a normative approach to the measurement of ex-ante inequality of opportunity in a multidimensional setting - that is, when the individual outcome is represented by a multidimensional variable. We characterize three classes of social welfare functions, all endorsing ex-ante...

Der vorliegende Beitrag setzt sich mit dem Beitrag von Georg Breidenstein „Ungleiche Grundschulen und die meritokratische Fiktion im deutschen Schulsystem“ auseinander. Dabei werden viele Aspekte von Breidenstein unterstrichen. Allerdings wiederspricht der Beitrag in einem zentralen Punkt,...

The aim of this paper is to investigate policy instruments by which the persistence of inequality is affected through financial development channels in 48 African countries for the period 1996 - 2014. Financial dynamic channels of depth (money supply and liquid liabilities), efficiency (at...

The explosion of the pandemic has been optimistically considered as the ''last straw that breaks the camel's back''. At the time of writing, after three months since its out- burst, we can hardly find any sign of a ''broken camel'': indeed, it could have been the opportunity to collectively...

We complement the institutional literature on gender and the welfare state by examining how taxes and transfers affect the incomes of men and women. Using microsimulation and intra-household income splitting rules, we measure the differences in the level and composition of individual disposable...

This paper aims to quantify the effects from migration on net income distributions, disentangling the roles played by factor reallocation and remittances, and focusing on two (primarily) destination countries (Spain and Italy) and two (primarily) origin countries (Jordan and Iraq). Using LIS-ERF...

This paper proposes three theoretical mechanisms through which polygyny may be related to social unrest. The mechanisms are related to different dimensions of grievance-inducing and, partly, greed-related inequality, which may occur in polygynous societies. These dimensions include (i) economic,...

This paper evaluates structural change, inequality dynamics, and industrial policy in South Africa between 1960 and the present day. We find that South Africa experienced growth-enhancing structural transformation until the early 1970s, before entering a period of premature deindustrialization....