This paper presents estimates of the unification bonus for East Germans over the period 1991 to 1998. The unification bonus is defined as the discounted value of the difference between a person's actual income and his or her counterfactual real income stream forecast for a hypothetical...

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...

Our analysis finds that despite the growing number, the majority of savings banks currently do not make any payouts. Furthermore, savings banks distribute only a small part of their net profit to the shareholders. This means that they can still build up capital even if they make payouts. Savings...

In this article, we present a model that can account for the changes in the Germancurrent account balance since the 2000s. Our results suggest that an array of struc-tural tax and labor market reforms (Agenda 2010), population aging and pensionreforms led to an increase in the household savings...