In many countries organized as federations, fiscal-equalization schemes have been implemented to mitigate vertical or horizontal imbalances. Such schemes usually imply that the member states of the federation can only partly internalize marginal tax revenue before redistribution. Aside from this...

In view of rising concerns over increasing inequality in the European Union since the financial crisis, this study provides an inequality decomposition of the overall European income distribution by country. The EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions are our empirical basis. Inequality...

Since 2002 the German government seeks to stimulate private retirement savings by means of special allowances and tax exemptions - the so-called Riester scheme. We apply matching and panel regression techniques to assess the impact of the Riester scheme on households' propensities to save in a...

We outline a procedure for combining six cross-sections of the German Sample Survey of Income and Expenditure, and discuss potential pitfalls of such a venture. Particularly, we investigate the consequences of a major break in the survey design for inter-temporal comparisons of expenditure...

We study inter-temporal changes in poverty for Germany from year 1978 to 2003, and we employ the bootstrap method to test for statistical significance of results. All results are decomposed by household type and region. Poverty estimates are particularly high for single parents. Most striking,...

We use a survey method designed to capture whether the consumption sharing ability of households varies systematically at different levels of well being. Evidence from Cyprus reconfirms our previous results from other countries, that household consumption economies of scale increase as the...

In 2001 the German government started to promote the development of private pensions by means of special saving subsidies and tax incentives (Riester-scheme). That policy especially targets households with relatively low incomes. Using data from the German Socio-economic Panel, we scrutinize the...

We employ German Sample Survey Income data to examine income inequality and the financial situation of elderly citizens for the period from 1978 to 2003, focussing on differences between retired and non-retired elderly and between elderly with residence in the Old and the New German Laender....