Tax Benefits from Employer-Sponsored Pension Plans

In Germany, there are four different legal structures for employer-sponsored pension plans. Tax treatment at the firm level as well as at the level of the employee or pensioner differs between these four vehicles. This article evaluates and compares the tax benefit from comparable plans within the four different vehicles in a capital budgeting model which takes into account cash flows of both parties – employer and employee. We abstract from non-tax differences, such as administrative costs, investment rules, or different possible risk-return-profiles. After a brief overview of the literature, in Section 2 the assumptions and the structure of the calculus are presented. Section 3 is devoted to individual retirement savings out of taxed income. These results are used as a benchmark for the employer-sponsored pension schemes. Section 4 presents calculations for all four legal forms of pension plans and illustrates them with an example. A detailed comparison of the alternatives and a discussion of the results are given in Section 5. Section 6 summarizes