Theresa Neef

The Long Way to Gender Equality: Gender Pay Differences in Germany, 1871-2021. World Inequality Lab WP N°2024/02

This paper provides the first time series of the gender earnings ratio for the full-time employed workforce in Germany since the 1870s and compares Germany’s path with the Swedish and U.S. cases. The first half of the 20th century exhibited a marked leap. In Germany, the gender earnings ratio increased from 47% in 1913 to 58% in 1937. Similar increases are visible in Sweden and the United States. In all three countries, the interplay between increased women’s education and increased returns to education due to the expanding white-collar sector fueled pay convergence. Yet in Germany, women’s educational catch-up was slowed due to the dominance of on-the-job vocational training.

The Distribution of National Income in Germany, 1992-2019. (joint with Stefan Bach and Charlotte Bartels) SSRN Working Paper

Revise and Resubmit at European Economic Review

This paper presents Distributional National Accounts (DINA) for Germany from 1992 to 2016. We combine personal income tax files with SOEP survey data to estimate the distribution of national income following the DINA method established by Piketty et al. (2018). The top 0.1% receives 6% of national income, which is similar to the United States and twice as high as in France. We link this to the predominance of closely held partnerships among Germany’s economic elite.

Earlier results in our chapter in the NBER conference volume: Chetty, R., Friedman, J. N., Gornick, J.C., Johnson, B. and A. Kennickell (eds.): Measuring distribution and mobility of income and wealth, 2021, University of Chicago Press.

When capitalism takes over socialism: the lasting economic divide between East and West Germany (joint with Charlotte Bartels and Andre Diegmann)

We investigate the economic divide between East and West German residents along the regional income and wealth distributions employing the Distributional National Accounts method. We find that East German residents still earn and own a fraction of their West German counterparts. The gap widens towards the top of the distribution due to East Germans’ lower business income and wealth. Investigating the causes, we find that reunification boosted West German top incomes. We link this to the privatization process of the 1990s in which predominantly West German investors acquired formerly state-owned East German capital.