As simple as they may be, results describing the world are heavily dependent on the quality of the underlying data. One of the crucial variables in micro-analyses of well-being and human resources is income. This variable becomes even more crucial when the subject of analysis is the situation of the self-employed.

This paper focuses on the distribution of income based on very sound data: the German Income Tax Statistics (Einkommensteuerstatistik) 1992. Tbis was the first actual opportunity to use such asound micro-database to analyse the selfemployed in particular: a 100,000 micro-data sampie of the German Income Tax Statistics for the entire population. New is the comparison between income from dependent and self-employed work with an emphasis on entrepreneurs and professions; also new is the in-depth decomposition of inequality by the employment status (employee, entrepreneur, profession) and by single professions based on a generalised entropy decomposition approach.

One overall striking result is that the occupational status as an employee, entrepreneur or a professional and its relationship to the share of inequality is hardly the most important factor wh ich explains the overall income distribution and inequality pieture of reunified Germany; rather, it is within-group inequality which has the primary influence.