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...

Financing consumption of the elderly in the face of the projected increase in life expectancy is a key challenge for economic policy. Moreover, standard structural models with fully rational agents suggest that about 50-60 percent of old-age consumption is financed with voluntary savings, even...

Research on welfare participation often shows significant differences between immigrants and natives that are often attributed to immigrants' higher risk of welfare dependence. We study whether immigrants in Germany also differ from their German counterparts in their take-up behavior conditional...

Despite the large-scale antipoverty programs, especially food and nutrition programs, 15 per cent of Indian population is undernourished. India's current implementation of the world largest food aid program, the National Food Security Act (NFSA), experiences many challenges and needs rigorous...

In light of climate change mitigation efforts, revenues from climate policies are growing, with no consensus yet on how they should be used. Potential efficiency gains from reducing distortionary taxes and the distributional implications of different revenue recycling schemes are currently...

The present paper aims to quantify efficiency properties of real world social security systems of various institutional designs in order to identify an optimal pension design. Starting from a benchmark economy without social security, we introduce alternative pension systems and compare the...