This paper studies the evolution of wage inequality in Germany between 1985 and 2020 using matched employer-employee data. We analyze wage dynamics across 272 industries and four task-based occupational groups, constructing 993 industry–occupation cells consistently observed over 35 years. Total wage variance rose by 9 log points, with about two-thirds of the increase driven by widening differences between 22 cells. These mainly comprise non-routine abstract occupations in high-paying industries and non-routine manual occupations in low-paying sectors. The disproportionate contribution of these 22 cells reflects their employment concentration, growing polarization in relative wages, and stronger assortative matching between workers and firms. Overall, our findings show that rising wage inequality cannot be explained by firms or industries alone. Instead, it is the interaction between industrial structure and occupational tasks that plays a central role in shaping the growth of wage dispersion.

We use the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic as a natural experiment to identify the scale and mechanisms of inheritance tax planning in the United Kingdom. The pandemic created an exogenous mortality shock that abruptly reduced time for anticipatory planning. Linking administrative inheritance tax returns to high-frequency mortality data, we compare estates of individuals who died unexpectedly during the pandemic with observationally similar decedents from pre-pandemic years. Unexpected deaths are associated with significantly larger reported estate, raising average estate values by about £350,000, and a 5 percentage point increase in effective tax rates. We estimate that inheritance tax planning reduces effective liabilities by at least 55 percent, implying annual revenue losses of £3-4.5 billion. Inter-vivos transfers, rather than within-estate portfolio restructuring, are the primary planning margin. These findings highlight the central role of the seven-year gift rule and suggest that revenue-raising reforms should focus on lifetime transfers.

If differences in market labor earnings between members of a population were to be distributed identically to the observed differences between same-sex siblings, how much inequality would remain? Consistent with Rawls' principle of fair equality of opportunity, we provide an answer to this question, the “fair Gini coefficient," which we estimate for 16 medium- and high-income countries, using consistently defined administrative data. And we show that it is a lower bound for the level of inequality produced by an income-generating process in the hypothetical absence of gender and parental advantage. We find that countries with lower market earnings inequality are not distinctively fair; the fair Gini coefficient relative to total inequality differs little across countries, from Sweden to Brazil. We characterize the formal properties of our statistic and six other measures of gender and parental advantage, and provide estimates from our data set.

This paper introduces a novel and harmonised global database on estate, inheritance, and gift (EIG) taxation, covering more than 170 countries — some with data going back to the 18th century. We document long-term global trends in EIG taxation, which are marked by declining numbers of countries levying such taxes, reductions in top marginal rates, and diminished progressivity since the 1980s. Leveraging both global and U.S. state-level data, we estimate the elasticity of EIG tax revenues

with respect to top marginal rates, finding that a one percentage point increase in the top rate raises revenues by approximately 7%, with larger effects in recent decades. We also show that the erosion of EIG taxes is associated with long-term increases in wealth concentration: five years after a one percentage point decrease in the top rate, the Gini coefficient increases by 0.14, on average.