We examine how firms adapt their organization when they go public. To conform with the requirements of public capital markets, we expect IPO firms to become more organized, making the firm more accountable and its human capital more easily replaceable. We find that IPO firms transform into a more hierarchical organization with smaller departments. Managerial oversight increases. Organizational functions dedicated to accounting, finance, information and communication, and human resources become much more prominent. Employee turnover is sizeable and directly related to changes in hierarchical layers. New hires are better educated, but younger and less experienced than incumbents, which reflects the staffing needs of a more hierarchical organization. Wage inequality increases as firms become more hierarchical. Overall, going public is associated with a comprehensive transformation of the firm's organization which becomes geared towards efficiently operating a public firm.

Wage mobility reduces the persistence of wage inequality. We develop a framework to quantify the contribution of employer-to-employer movers to aggregate wage mobility. Using three decades of German social security data, we find that inequality increased while aggregate wage mobility decreased. Employer-to-employer movers exhibit higher wage mobility, mainly due to changes in employer wage premia at job change. The massive structural changes following German unification temporarily led to a high number of movers, which in turn boosted aggregate wage mobility. Wage mobility is much lower at the bottom of the wage distribution, and the decline in aggregate wage mobility since the 1980s is concentrated there. The overall decline can be mostly attributed to a reduction in wage mobility per mover, which is due to a compositional shift toward lower-wage movers.

Climate change and inequality are critical and interrelated defining issues for this century. Despite growing empirical evidence on the economic incidence of climate policies and impacts, mainstream model-based assessments are often silent on the interplay between climate change and economic inequality. For example, all the major model comparisons reviewed in IPCC neglect within-country inequalities. Here we fill this gap by presenting a model ensemble of eight large-scale Integrated Assessment Models belonging to different model paradigms and featuring economic heterogeneity. We study the distributional implications of Paris-aligned climate target of 1.5 degree and include different carbon revenue redistribution schemes. Moreover, we account for the economic inequalities resulting from residual and avoided climate impacts. We find that price-based climate policies without compensatory measures increase economic inequality in most countries and across models. However, revenue redistribution through equal per-capita transfers can offset this effect, leading to on average decrease in the Gini index by almost two points. When climate benefits are included, inequality is further reduced, but only in the long term. Around mid-century, the combination of dried-up carbon revenues and yet limited climate benefits leads to higher inequality under the Paris target than in the Reference scenario, indicating the need for further policy measures in the medium term.

We investigate public preferences for equity-enhancing policies in access to early child care, using a survey experiment with a representative sample of the German population (n ≈ 4, 800). We observe strong misperceptions about migrant-native inequalities in early child care that vary by respondents’ age and right-wing voting preferences. Randomly providing information about the actual extent of inequalities has a nuanced impact on the support for equity-enhancing policy reforms: it increases support for respondents who initially underestimated these inequalities, and tends to decrease support for those who initially overestimated them. This asymmetric effect leads to a more consensual policy view, substantially decreasing the polarization in policy support between under- and overestimators. Our results suggest that correcting misperceptions can align public policy preferences, potentially leading to less polarized debates about how to address inequalities and discrimination.

This paper analyzes the distribution and composition of pre-tax national income in Germany since 1992, combining personal income tax returns, household survey data, and national accounts. Inequality rose from the 1990s to the late 2000s due to falling labor incomes among the bottom 50% and rising incomes in the top 10%. This trend reversed after 2007 as labor incomes across the bottom 90% increased. The top 1% income share, dominated by business income, remained relatively stable between 1992 and 2019. A large share of Germany’s top 1% earners are non-corporate business owners in labor-intensive professions. At least half of the business owners in P99-99.9 and a quarter in the top 0.1% operate firms in professional services – a pattern mirroring the United States. From 1992 to 2019, Germany’s top 0.1% income concentration exceeded France’s and matched U.S. levels until the late 2000s.

Wage mobility reduces the persistence of wage inequality. We develop a framework to quantify the contribution of employer-to-employer movers to aggregate wage mobility. Using three decades of German social security data, we find that inequality increased while aggregate wage mobility decreased. Employer-to-employer movers exhibit higher wage mobility, mainly due to changes in employer wage premia at job change. The massive structural changes following German unification temporarily led to a high number of movers, which in turn boosted aggregate wage mobility. Wage mobility is much lower at the bottom of the wage distribution, and the decline in aggregate wage mobility since the 1980s is concentrated there. The overall decline can be mostly attributed to a reduction in wage mobility per mover, which is due to a compositional shift toward lower-wage movers.

We investigate public preferences for equity-enhancing policies in access to early child care, using a survey experiment with a representative sample of the German population (n ≈ 4, 800). We observe strong misperceptions about migrant-native inequalities in early child care that vary by respondents’ age and right-wing voting preferences. Randomly providing information about the actual extent of inequalities has a nuanced impact on the support for equity-enhancing policy reforms: it increases support for respondents who initially underestimated these inequalities, and tends to decrease support for those who initially overestimated them. This asymmetric effect leads to a more consensual policy view, substantially decreasing the polarization in policy support between under- and overestimators. Our results suggest that correcting misperceptions can align public policy preferences, potentially leading to less polarized debates about how to address inequalities and discrimination.