Abstract While income inequality in Germany considerably increased in the years before 2005, this trend stopped after 2005. We address the question of what factors were responsible for the break in the inequality trend after 2005. Our analysis suggests that income inequality in Germany did not continue to rise after 2005 for the following reasons. First, we observe that the general rise in wage inequality that explained a lot of the inequality increase before 2005, became less steep (but did not stop) after 2005. Second, despite further increases in wage inequality after 2005, inequality in annual labour incomes did not increase further after 2005 because increased within-year employment opportunities compensated otherwise rising inequality in annual labour incomes. Third, income inequality did not fall in a more marked way after 2005 because also the middle and the upper part of the distribution benefited from the employment boom after 2006. Finally, we provide evidence that the effect of a wide range of other factors that are often suspected to have influenced the distribution such as capital incomes, household structures, population ageing, changes in the tax and transfer system and the financial crisis of 2008 did not significantly alter the distribution after 2005.

中文翻译：

---

为什么德国的收入不平等现象在2005年之后没有进一步增加？

摘要虽然德国的收入不平等在2005年之前的年份中有相当大的增长，但这一趋势在2005年后才停止。我们解决了导致2005年之后的不平等趋势发生变化的原因是什么。我们的分析表明，德国的收入不平等并没有持续下去由于以下原因，在2005年之后上升。首先，我们观察到工资不平等的普遍上升解释了2005年之前的许多不平等增长，但在2005年之后变得不那么陡峭（但并没有停止）。第二，尽管2005年之后工资不平等进一步加剧，但年度劳动收入的不平等2005年之后，这一数字并未进一步增加，因为年内就业机会的增加抵消了年劳动收入不平等现象的加剧。第三，