Distributional Effects of Subsidizing Retirement Savings Accounts: Evidence from Germany

The Distributional Effects of Early School Stratification – Non-Parametric Evidence from Germany

Whether early school stratification is conducive or detrimental to scholastic performance has been subject to controversial debates in educational policy and science across many countries. We exploit a unique exogenous variation in Lower Saxony, Germany, where performance based tracking was preponed from grade 7 to grade 5 in 2004, i.e. with the completion of primary school. In particular, we m...

Medical savings accounts: lessons from Singapore.

In the Spring 1995 issue of Health Affairs Mark Pauly and John Goodman outlined their proposal for medical savings accounts (MSAs) supplemented with tax credits to purchase insurance and encourage cost-effective consumer behavior. This proposal has been widely debuted, both in Washington and across the nation. To further enlighten the debate, Health Affairs presents two accounts of the experien...

Weather Insurance Savings Accounts

Better insurance against rainfall risk could improve the security of hundreds of millions of agricultural households around the world. This paper theoretically and experimentally analyzes an innovative financial product called a Weather Insurance Savings Account (WISA), which combines savings and rainfall insurance. We index the insurance share of the WISA by γ ∈ [0, 1] and use a standard model...

Savings and Prize-Linked Savings Accounts

Savings and Prize-Linked Savings Accounts Many households have insufficient savings to handle moderate and routine consumption shocks. Many of these financially fragile households also have the highest lottery expenditures as a proportion of income. This combination suggests that Prize-Linked Savings (PLS) accounts, that combine principal-security with lottery-type jackpots, can increase saving...

Medical Savings Accounts: