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3 An alternative approach is the "ongoing concern" treatment. It derives pension wealth under the assumption that employees continue to work at their place of employment until expected date of retirement. We abstain from implementing this approach as it requires strong assumptions about employees' future employment biographies and retirement decisions. 4 We have included private pension plans in net worth as these plans are difficult to distinguish from other types of private savings. 5 Further examples are private pensions (Riester and Rürup pensions) that are subject to deferred taxation. In case of real estate and assets, the time of sale determines the tax burden of a divestiture of real estate (e.g., via the market value of assets and the income tax on resulting gains). and its role for households' overall wealth. The present paper differs from Frick and Grabka (2010, 2013) in several ways:1. Definition of wealth aggregate. As in Grabka (2010, 2013), our wealth aggregate includes occupational pensions of both the retired and non-retired population. In contrast to Grabka (2010, 2013), our wealth aggregates are pre-rather than post-taxes. 2. Comprehensiveness of the analysis. While Frick and Grabka (2010, 2013) focus on the level effect of the inclusion of pension wealth in a broader wealth concept, we provide a decomposition of wealth inequality by factors. Further, we assess the variability of our estimators by means of a bootstrap procedure. 3. Consistency of data. Our analysis relies on a single dataset, in which both net worth and pension entitlements were surveyed directly. Because of data limitations, Frick and Grabka (2010, 2013) use two distinct microdata sets and link them by means of statistical matching. Their statistical matching procedure relies on age trajectories of key variables. For late birth cohorts, the trajectories are short and contain little information. For early birth cohorts, there is significant item non-response, requiring considerable data imputation. Such and other issues have unknown implications for the accuracy of their analysis. 4. Period of analysis. Whereas Frick and Grabka (2010, 2013) analyze data from 2007, we use more recent data from 2012 and 2013.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in AbstractGovernmental activities in welfare states influence private charitable giving predominantly in two ways: (1) government spending on the provision of public goods may cause crowding out of private charitable contributions; and (2) tax incentives may boost private charitable giving.For a rich sample of German income tax returns, we estimate elasticities of charitable giving regarding tax incentives, income and governmental spending. Using censored quantile regression, we are able to derive results for different points of the underlying distribution of charitable giving. Assuming a world with impure altruism (Andreoni 1990), we find evidence for impurely altruistic giving behaviour. Taking crowding out into account, tax deductibility of charitable giving suffices to foster private giving to offset foregone tax revenues.

We compare the evolution of earnings instability in Germany and the United Kingdom, two countries which stand for different types of welfare states. Deploying data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), we estimate permanent and transitory variances of male income over the period 1984-2009 and 1991-2006, respectively. Studies in this literature generally use individual labor earnings. To uncover the role of welfare state and households in smoothening earnings shocks, we compute different income concepts ranging from gross earnings to net equivalent household income. We find evidence that the overall inequality of earnings in Germany and the United Kingdom has been rising throughout the period due to both higher permanent earnings inequality and higher earnings volatility. However, taking institutions of the welfare state and risk-sharing households into account, we find that the volatility of net household income has remained fairly stable. Furthermore, redistribution and risk insurance provided by the welfare state is more pronounced in Germany than in the United Kingdom. JEL Codes: D31, D63, I38, J31Note: We thank two anonymous referees and the editor for valuable suggestions. Furthermore, we are grateful to Giacomo Corneo and Stephen Jenkins for their most helpful advice and support throughout the research, to Joshua Holm for his assistance, and to participants of ECINEQ 2009 and IIPF 2010 conferences for useful comments. All remaining deficiencies are our own responsibility.