Income Inequality and Assortative Mating
IW-Trends
German Economic Institute (IW)
From 1998 to 2008 income inequality increased markedly. The Gini coefficient of the net equivalized income rose by 15 percent. Conceptually, using equivalized incomes implies that differences in the income within the households are eliminated. This redistribution is the more pronounced the more the individual incomes differ. These intra-household differences have diminished, though. The analysis of couple incomes reveals that the combination of low incomes of both partners has become more frequent. On the other hand, the breadwinner model with one partner working full-time and one partner not working at all – a combination mostly accompanied by high income differences within the household – has become less important. The increasing similarity of the partners with respect to education, labor force participation and income has reduced the inequality within the households but increased the inequality between households.
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Christoph Schröder: Einkommensungleichheit und Homogamie
IW-Trends
German Economic Institute (IW)
Gainful Employment and Caregiving: Reconciling Formal Employment with Caring for a Relative
German society is ageing, and more and more of those in paid employment are having to combine their jobs with caring for a relative. Of the approximately 5.7 million family caregivers in Germany in 2022, almost three quarters were under 66 and thus still of working age.
IW
Co-payments in inpatient care: An analysis of regional cost differences
This report is based on the evaluation of price data from a total of 10,820 full-time nursing homes in Germany which are provided on the ‘pflegelotse.de’ platform of the Association of Substitute Health Insurance Funds (vdek) and were collected at the beginning of October 2024 using a web scraping process.
IW