After a slow start and several design changes, Riester pension plans took off very quickly. While saving incentives were effective in reaching parents, they were somewhat less successful in attracting low-income earners, although Riester pensions exhibit a more equal pattern by income than...

This paper contributes to the debate on the adequate elicitation of individual risk attitudes in general socio-economic surveys. A multi-item question on the willingness to take risk, a very short form of the DOSPERT scale (Weber et al., 2002) and a series of lottery tasks are compared with...

There is an increasing interest among social scientists in merging survey data with administrative records from social security institutions. Record linkage represents one way to combine different sources using a unique identifier such as the Social Security number. The informed consent of the...

Population Aging poses an evident threat to the financial sustainability of pension systems based on a “pay-as-you-go” (PAYG) scheme. To cope with this threat, pension systems have undergone numerous reforms in many countries in order to keep people longer at work. One crucial element of...

The spread of the state subsidized private pension scheme (Riester pension), taken as a whole, still continues very dynamically. Ten years after the introduction of the Riester pension, however, its distribution among certain groups of the population remains fairly low. One reason seems to be...

We investigate how nutritional status responded to economic growth in Italy during 1861-1911. By combining household-level data on food consumption with population censuses, we estimate that the incidence of undernutrition decreased by about 10-15 percent between 1881 and 1901. Consumption of...