Essays on Inequality: Income Distribution, (Just) Taxation and Well-being ; Eassys zu Ungleichheit: Einkommensverteilung, (gerechter) Besteuerung und Wohlbefinden
This dissertation focuses on three dimensions of inequality: income, (just) taxation, and well-being. All chapters focus on a similar time horizon (2000 to 2015) and essentially on the same geographical area, Germany. The chapters are organized in four parts, each examining a specific research question and based on evidence from microdata - the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). The analysis of chapter 2 is additionally based on European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC). Chapter 2 develops a new method to obtain top-corrected income distributions by combining easily available information from tax and survey data. The benefits of the two data sources are combined by imputing top incomes in survey data using the information on top income distribution from tax data. In detail, the integrated approach replaces the top 1 % of the survey income distribution with Pareto-imputed incomes using the information on the top incomes' distribution from the World Wealth and Income Database (WID). This approach is easily applicable by relying on information publicly available from the WID for the upper tail of the distribution and easily accessible survey data, such as the German SOEP or EU-SILC, for the middle and bottom of the distribution. Neither access to tax record microdata, which is limited and difficult to obtain in many countries, nor record linkage, which is often not allowed, is needed. Furthermore, this integrated approach allows for producing inequality measures for a variety of income definitions and for the entire population of a country, e.g., analyzing inequality in households' needs. We apply our approach to German SOEP and European EU-SILC survey data which in some countries include administrative data and find higher inequality in those European countries that exclusively rely (Germany, UK) or have relied (Spain) on interviews for the provision of EU-SILC survey data as compared to countries that use administrative data. Chapter 3 uses the optimal taxation framework by Saez (2002). ...