This paper explores the problem of effective taxation at the lower end of the income scale in Germany. For the recipients of social income maintenance--currently about 1.8 million nationals--effective taxation consists not only of the explicit taxation through the tax code but also of the...

Austria has probably the world’s highest pension expenditures relative to its economic size, largely because of the generosity of its pension system. This paper examines the institutional setup of the Austrian pension system and projects its future development based on current policies. The...

This paper analyzes the empirical determinants of household saving using data from 21 OECD countries for 1975-95. A particular focus is the influence of the tax and social security systems on household saving. The paper therefore extends the usual set of explanatory variables used to explain...

This paper examines empirical determinants of private saving for a sample of economies in Southeast Asia and Latin America over the period 1975–95. It uses panel estimations to establish relationships between private saving rates and a range of policy and nonpolicy variables. The findings show...

This paper argues that limited asset market participation is crucial in explaining U.S. macroeconomic performance and monetary policy before the 1980s, and their changes thereafter. We develop an otherwise standard sticky-price dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model, which implies that at...

In recent years, New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (NK DSGE) models have become increasingly popular in the academic literature and in policy analysis. However, the success of these models in reproducing the dynamic behavior of an economy following structural shocks is still...

Intro -- Contents -- I. Introduction -- II. Limited Asset Market Participation and Monetary Policy: Some Theory -- III. Empirical Evidence -- IV. Change in Structure of Economy or in Distribution of Shocks? -- V. Conclusions -- General Model.

Despite intense calls for safeguarding public investment in Europe, public investment expenditure, when measured in relation to GDP, has steadily fallen in the last three decades, evoking fears that economic activity may be correspondingly negatively affected. At the same time, however, public...

In this paper, we revisit the effects of government spending shocks on private consumption within an estimated New-Keynesian DSGE model of the euro area featuring non-Ricardian households. Employing Bayesian inference methods, we show that the presence of non- Ricardian households is in general...