Demographic change causes an undersupply of financial old age benefits within the statutory pay-as-you-go pension system in Germany. Therefore, the provision of occupational as well as private pensions has to be enhanced. However, there seems to be an undersupply of occupational pension provision particularly in small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Using survey data of the German Socio-Economic ...
Abstract: We analyse benefit-entitlement effects and the likely impact of the recent reform of the unemployment compensation system on the duration of unemployment in Germany on the basis of a flexible discrete-time hazard rate model estimated on pre-reform data from the German Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP). We find (i) relatively strong benefit-entitlement effects for the unemployed who are eligible ...
This paper provides empirical evidence how the timing of employment breaks affects pension benefits in Germany. Analysing the biographical data set from the German Pension Insurance (SUF VVL 2004) the employment histories of individuals aged 21 to 60 can be mirrored in detail. We relate differences in pension benefits to employment breaks due to unemployment and parental leave in the individual life ...
The saving ratio of households in Germany has increased in the past few years when the income trend was weak. This could be due to precautionary saving. In this paper, the importance of precautionary saving against income uncertainty is analyzed empirically using micro data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (GSOEP). Wealth in 2002 is regressed on alternative measures of income uncertainty ...
This paper analyses the savings behaviour of natives and immigrants in Germany. It is argued that uncertainty about future income and legal status (in case of immigrants) is a key component in the determination of the level of precautionary savings. Using the German Socio-economic Panel data it is shown that, although immigrants have lower levels of savings and are less likely to have regular savings ...
We present a method for taking advantage of labour market transitions to identify effects of financial incentives on employment decisions. The framework we use is very flexible and by imposing few theoretical assumptions allows extending the modelled sample relative to struc-tural models. We take advantage of this flexibility to include disabled people in the model and to analyse behaviour of disabled ...
We examine optimal taxation and social insurance if insurance markets are imperfect. This requires the development of a theory of labor supply under uncertainty. We show that the case for social insurance is not generally reinforced by adverse selection in insurance markets as social insurance will have welfare-decreasing effects on the labor market. Furthermore, positive and normative implications ...
After the collapse in the early transition years, saving rates in Eastern European EU-accession countries have recovered strongly. But is private saving in these countries now driven by the same forces as in the EU? A GMM estimator is applied to analyze the determinants of private saving in both country groups. The main results are: saving rates are rather persistent; income growth increases saving, ...