Income Risk, Saving and Taxation:Will Precautionary Saving Survive?

Former theoretical and empirical studies find that precautionary savings are reduced in the presence of social security systems. The saving motive, however, does not change: individuals respond to increasing income risk by increasing their savings. Although this still holds for common tax and transfer systems, we show that this is not a feature of all tax and transfers systems. In contrast to former studies, we focus on the impact of the variability of future income (higher degree risk).