The Unification Bonus (Malus) of East Germans After the Fall of the Berlin Wall

Irwin Collier, Miriam Beblo and Thomas Knaus
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Miriam Beblo: Berlin School of Economics and Law
Thomas Knaus: German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology

Journal of Economic Integration, 2012, vol. 27, 222-244

Abstract:

This paper presents estimates of the unification bonus for East Germans over the period 1991 to 1998. The unification bonus is defined as the discounted value of the difference between a person’s actual income and his or her counterfactual real income stream forecast for a hypothetical continuation of economic life in a static GDR. Our central result is that nineteen percent of East Germans received a present value malus and so can be regarded as unification losers but that the aggregate bonus is ten times the size of the aggregate malus of the sample over this period.

Keywords: Real Income Comparison; Income Distribution and Mobility; Economies In Transition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D10 D30 P20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ris:integr:0570

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