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The Eff ect of Saving Subsidies on Household Saving – Evidence from Germanys
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Abstract
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 natural experiment framework. Estimation results from both the German Socio-Economic Panel and the SAVE study indicate that private saving was hardly aff ected by the introduction of the Riester scheme.Household saving; saving incentives; retirement; Riester scheme; coarsened exact matching