In 2001, the voluntary additional Riester pension scheme was implemented in Germany. Financial subsidies should incentivize people to increase their private pension savings. In this paper, we hypothesize that these publicly subsidized savings mainly replace existing not subsidized savings and...

The economic costs of chronic health conditions and severe illnesses like diabetes, coronary heart disease or cancer are immense. Several clinical trials give information about the impor-tance of individual behaviour for the prevalence of these illnesses. Changes in health relevant behaviour may...

The saving ratio of households in Germany has increased in the past few years when the income trend was weak. This could be due to precautionary saving. In this paper, the importance of precautionary saving against income uncertainty is analyzed empirically using micro data from the German...