With its commitment to double the share of renewables in electricity generation to at least 30% by 2020, the German government has embarked on a costly policy course whose public support remains an open empirical question. Building on ample household survey data, we trace peoples'...

Under cooperative federalism, when an identical tax tariff applies to all regions of a federation, usually redistribution rules are implemented to smooth fiscal differences. The administration of tax collection, however, is sometimes delegated to the regional level, leaving the regional...

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 is...

The jackknife is a resampling method that uses subsets of the original database by leaving out one observation at a time from the sample. The paper outlines a procedure to obtain jackknife estimates for several inequality indices with only a few passes through the data. The number of passes is...

Income-expenditure surveys typically provide incomes on the household level. As households can differ in size and needs, a reliable assessment of inequality in living standards, therefore, necessitates the conversion of the original heterogeneous into an artificial quasi-homogeneous population....

We employ German Sample Survey Income data to examine income inequality and the financial situation of elderly citizens for the period from 1978 to 2003, focussing on differences between retired and non-retired elderly and between elderly with residence in the Old and the New German Laender....

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...