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 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...

The jackknife is a resampling method that uses subsets of the original database by leaving out one observation at a time from the sample. The paper develops fast algorithms for jackknifing inequality indices with only a few passes through the data. The number of passes is independent of the...

The affordability of housing has become a major topic of discussion in Germany among both social scientists and the public at large. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we provide rent-income ratios over more than two decades and show how they change with households’...

Research on wealth inequality usually focuses on real and financial assets, while pension wealth – the present value of future pension entitlements from public and company pension schemes – receives little attention. This is astonishing, given that pension plans play an important role for...

By using estimates from an Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS), we investigate how the German energy tax on car fuels changes the private households-CO2 emissions, living standards, and post-tax income distribution. Our results show that the tax implies a trade-off between the aim to reduce...

In 2015, Germany introduced a statutory hourly minimum wage that was not only universally binding but also set at a relatively high level. We discuss the short-run effects of this new minimum wage on a wide set of socio-economic outcomes, such as employment and working hours, earnings and wage...

This study quantifies the short-term distributional effects of the new statutory minimum wage in Germany. Using detailed survey data (German Socio-Economic Panel), we assess changes in the distributions of hourly wages, contractual and actual working hours, and monthly earnings. Our descriptive...

We assess the short-term employment effects of the introduction of a national statutory minimum wage in Germany in 2015. For this purpose, we exploit variation in the regional treatment intensity, assuming that the stronger a minimum wage 'bites' into the regional wage distribution, the stronger...