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...

When individual or household incomes are collected for administrative or scientific surveys, the reference period of income is sometimes a month, sometimes a quarter, and sometimes a year. This reference period of income likely affects the shape of the distribution and derived measures of...

The present article assesses the redistributive effects of a key element of German climate change policy, the promotion of renewables in the electricity mix through the provision of a feed-in tariff. The tariff shapes the distribution of households’ disposable incomes by charging a levy that...

Nach der Sommerpause 2010 will die Bundesregierung ihr Energiekonzept vorstellen, das die Leitlinien des künftigen Energiemix definiert. Im Fokus der Diskussion stehen der Ausbau des Anteils erneuerbarer Energieträger an der Stromerzeugung sowie eine Verlängerung der Laufzeiten deutscher...

Much analysis in macroeconomics empirically addresses economy-wide incentives behind consumer/investment choices by using insights from the way a single representative household would behave. Heterogeneity at the micro level can jeopardize attempts to back up the representative consumer...

Based on six harmonized cross-sections of the German Sample Survey of Income and Expenditure, we study inter-temporal changes in poverty from year 1978 to 2003. Results are decomposed by region and household types, and the bootstrap method is applied to test for the statistical significance of...

In many countries organized as federations, fiscal-equalization schemes have been implemented to mitigate vertical or horizontal imbalances. Such schemes usually imply that the member states of the federation can only partly internalize marginal tax revenue before redistribution. Aside from this...

In view of rising concerns over increasing inequality in the European Union since the financial crisis, this study provides an inequality decomposition of the overall European income distribution by country. The EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions are our empirical basis. Inequality...