The effect of saving subsidies on household saving

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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