We extend previous work on the sustainability of the government’s intertemporal budget constraint by allowing for non-linear adjustment of the fiscal variables, conditional on (i) the sign of budgetary disequilibria and (ii) the phase of the economic cycle. Further, our endogenously estimated...

Unlike the crisis years of 2007-2009 (when the insolvency of large banks was a major problem), the current round of the global financial crisis has fiscal origins. Almost all developed countries suffer from an excessive public debt burden that has been built up over the last two decades or more....

This paper proposes a model to study how conditional lending and immediate liquidity provision affect incentives for fiscal adjustment in a country facing the risk of sovereign default. Conditional lending provides explicit incentives for fiscal adjustment but immediate liquidity provision is...

Die Riester-Förderung soll dazu beitragen, dass häufiger und mehr für die Altersvorsorge gespart wird. Der Einfluss der Riester-Förderung auf die Sparneigung von Haushalten mit niedrigem Einkommen ist dabei ein zentrales Kriterium zur ökonomischen Evaluation dieser Politik. Unsere...

Since 2002 the German government has promoted private retirement saving plans by means of special subsidies and tax incentives (Riester scheme). This policy mainly targets low-income households. Using data from the German Socio-economic Panel, we scrutinize the impact of the Riester scheme on...

In 2001 the German government started to promote the development of private pensions by means of special saving subsidies and tax incentives (Riester-scheme). That policy especially targets households with relatively low incomes. Using data from the German Socio-economic Panel, we scrutinize the...

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...

This paper documents the integration of microsimulation tools for direct taxation, indirect taxation, and social benefits in the context of the European tax and benefit simulator, EUROMOD. Integration has been developed in parallel for two countries: Belgium and Germany. The paper at hand...

Value added taxes (VAT) are an important, and in many cases increasing, source of revenue in both developed and developing countries. Unsurprisingly there is an intense academic and policy debate about the appropriate VAT rate structure, for both equity and efficiency reasons. In this paper we...

Much of the focus of the UK pensions policy debate over the past decade has been on the adequacy (or otherwise) of private retirement saving. In this paper, we present the first assessment of the optimality of the retirement resources of English couple households born in the 1940s. Here,...