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 analyze the distributive justice of the combined burden of taxes, social security contributions and public transfers on employee households. In order to investigate whether the treatment of families by the aggregate tax-benefit system can be regarded as "fair" we compare the equivalent...

We analyze the compliance costs of individual taxpyers resulting from the German income tax. using survey data that has been raised between December 2008 and April 2009, we find evidence for a considerably higher cost burden of self-employed taxpaxers. Taxable income and the demand for external...

The Panel on Household Finances (PHF) is a new panel survey on household finances and wealth in Germany conducted by the Deutsche Bundesbank. It covers the balance sheets, pension claims, savings, incomes and work histories of households, together with some information on consumption patterns,...