This paper addresses the questions of what is an economically efficient pension system, what are the externalities and what are the risks of the four alternative pension systems: financial defined contribution (FDC), notional or non-financial defined contribution (NDC), financial defined benefit...

This chapter defines a universal public pension scheme (UPPS) as a government-mandated lifecycle longevity insurance scheme that transfers individual consumption from the working years to the retirement phase of the lifecycle. It discusses the differences in four UPPS designs defined with regard...

We examine the second-best family policy under the assumption that both the number and the future earning capacities of the children born to a couple are random variables with probability distributions conditional on unobservable parental actions. Potential parents take their decisions without...

Promotion tournaments play an important role for the provision of incentives in firms. In this paper, we extend research on single-stage rank-order tournaments and analyze behavior in multi-stage elimination tournaments. The main treatment of our laboratory experiment is a two-stage tournament...

This paper investigates whether risk preferences explain how individuals are sorted into occupations with different earnings variability. We exploit data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, which contains a subjective assessment of willingness to take risks whose behavioral relevance has been...

Many economic decisions involve a substantial amount of uncertainty, and therefore crucially depend on how individuals process probabilistic information. In this paper, we investigate the capability for probability judgment in a representative sample of the German population. Our results show...

We study how website defaults affect consumer behavior in the domain of charitable giving. In a field experiment that was conducted on a large platform for making charitable donations over the web, we exogenously vary the default options in two distinct choice dimensions. The first pertains to...