Compulsory military service is still a prominent feature of young people's careers in many countries. We use the abolition of compulsory military and civil service for males in 2011 in Germany as a natural experiment to identify effects of institutionalized career disruptions on life...

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 empirically investigate the distributional consequences of the Riester scheme, the main private pension subsidization program in Germany. We find that 38% of the aggregate subsidy accrues to the top two deciles of the population, but only 7.3% to the bottom two. Nonetheless the Riester scheme...

We solve the problem of a social planner who seeks to minimize inequality via transfers with a fixed public budget in a distribution of exogenously given incomes. The appropriate solution method depends on the objective function: If it is convex, as in the case of the absolute mean deviation, it...

Vor dem Hintergrund der sozialen Marktwirtschaft wird Prekarität als eine Folge von arbeitsmarkt- und sozialpolitischen Veränderungen diskutiert. Es wird bilanziert, dass der soziale Zusammenhalt der Arbeitsgesellschaft in Deutschland gefährdet ist. Im Anschluss an diese Diskussion geht die...