Analysing Inequalities in Germany ─ A Structured Additive Distributional Regression Approach

This book seeks new perspectives on the growing inequalities that our societies face, putting forward Structured Additive Distributional Regression as a means of statistical analysis that circumvents the common problem of analytical reduction to simple point estimators. This new approach allows the observed discrepancy between the individuals’ realities and the abstract representation of those realities to be explicitly taken into consideration using the arithmetic mean alone. In turn, the method is applied to the question of economic inequality in Germany.

Alexander Silbersdorff is a research associate at the Department of Statistics, University of Gottingen, Germany, where he predominantly works on the development and application of regression techniques to economic contexts. Previously, he served at the Department of Economic History at the University of Bielefeld, Germany, where he investigated the development of historical income structures.