TY  - JOUR
AU  - Fuchs-Schündeln,Nicola
AU  - Krueger,Dirk
AU  - Sommer,Mathias
TI  - Inequality Trends for Germany in the Last Two Decades: A Tale of Two Countries
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 15059
PY  - 2009
Y2  - June 2009
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15059
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15059.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Nicola Fuchs-Schuendeln
Goethe University Frankfurt
House of Finance
60323 Frankfurt
Germany
Tel: +49 69 798-33815
Fax: +49 69 798-33925
E-Mail: fuchs@wiwi.uni-frankfurt.de

Dirk Krueger
Department of Economics
University of Pennsylvania
3718 Locust Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Tel: 215/898-6691
Fax: 215/573-2057
E-Mail: dkrueger@econ.upenn.edu

Mathias Sommer
Mannheim Research Institute for
  the Economics of Aging
University of Mannheim
L 13, 17
68131 Mannueim, Germany
E-Mail: mathias.sommer@gmx.net
AB  - In this paper we first document inequality trends in wages, hours worked, earnings, consumption, and wealth for Germany from the last twenty years. We generally find that inequality was relatively stable in West Germany until the German unification (which happened politically in 1990 and in our data in 1991), and then trended upwards for wages and market incomes, especially after about 1998. Disposable income and consumption, on the other hand, display only a modest increase in inequality over the same period. These trends occured against the backdrop of lower trend growth of earnings, incomes and consumption in the 1990s relative to the 1980s. In the second part of the paper we further analyze the differences between East and West Germans in terms of the evolution of levels and inequality of wages, income, and consumption.
ER  -