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...

In this paper, by using panel data and a fixed effects model, we estimate the direct rebound effect related to space heating in German residential households. The data used are from a representative repeated survey among some 11,000 households in Germany provided by the German Institute of...

This paper investigates the relationship between wealth, ageing and saving behaviour of private households by using pooled cross sections of German consumption survey data. Different components of wealth are distinguished, as their impact on the savings rate is not homogeneous. On average, the...

This paper investigates the co-movements of job security perceptions and household saving rates using data from the 1992 to 2010 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel. The empirical analysis reveals that higher job insecurity is generally accompanied by slightly lower saving which suggests...

Overindebted private households have created economic and political concern. Using measures of relative (over-) indebtedness which relate household income and debt services to different concepts of subsistence levels, this paper investigates whether severe household indebtedness is driven by...

Focusing on travel survey data from Germany, this paper investigates the determinants of automobile travel, with the specific aim of quantifying the effects of fuel prices and fuel economy. The analysis is predicated on the notion that car mileage is a two-stage decision process, comprising the...

We estimate direct and indirect energy rebound effects for a wide variety of goods and services in Germany. To this end, we employ a linearized approximation of the popular Almost Ideal Demand System (LAIDS) approach suggested by Deaton and Muellbauer (1980). Excluding measures of energy...

This paper discusses the effect of residential energy prosuming on households' energy consumption behavior with the objective to find evidence for a “prosumer rebound effect” on energy consumption. Prosuming is the partial self-consumption of distributed energy production. We hypothesize...

With the increased adoption of solar photovoltaics (PV) and batteries, and the use of electronicsand appliances powered by direct current (DC), e.g. heat pumps, and electric vehicles (EVs), DCtechnologies offer higher energy efficiency compared to the entrenched alternating current...

Using the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), this paper investigates the determinants of training participation in Germany, distinguishing between self-initiated and employer-initiated training. Self-initiated training is considered as being a decision within households rather than purely individual....