Estonia is widely regarded as a paramount example for a successful transformation of a socialist economic system to a functioning market economy. Against the backdrop of this positive image which contrasts strongly with the crisis scenarios in Southern Europe the remaining problems of Estonia...

In Germany persons who receive public assistance (Sozialhilfe) may keep only a small part of income from employment above a certain amount. This means that for some persons living on welfare the economic incentives to look for employment are rather weak. This working paper discusses different...

The paper compares the pay-as-you-go system and a capital funded system of old age insurance. The capital funded system has a higher rate of return. Pension income can be obtained at lower costs for the individual. This implies efficiency gains in terms of higher savings and reduced distortion...

There are only few estimates of the returns on contributions to the German public pension System (GPPS). Those that are published ränge between nominal rates of future returns between about 4,5 % and 48 %, indicating that GPPS treats different groups of people differently. The authors develop a...

The paper presents labor productivities in the member countries of Euroland. The result is that there is quite a divergence in labor productivities (per head) in the European Monetary Union. The Netherlands and Italy reach 85 percent of the West German level, Spain 62 and Portugal 35. This...

This paper examines the role of the health gradient ; the positive correlation between household income and health – in individual retirement behavior, using data from the German Socio-economic Panel (GSOEP). We first estimate agegroup-specific health gradients and find their slope increases...

This paper is concerned with establishing the data base that is necessary to analyse the "double burden" argument which has been used to reject a sweeping reform of the German old-age pension system. We show that this argument does not hold if the existing pay-as-you-go system were to be...

This study investigates the role of stratification of health and income in the social cost of health-related early retirement, as evidenced in the German Socio-economic Panel (GSOEP). We interpret early retirement as a mechanism to limit work-related declines in health that allows poorer and...

Whereas microeconomic studies point to pronounced downward rigidity of nominal wages in the US economy, the standard Phillips curve neglects such a feature. Using a stochastic frontier model we find macroeconomic evidence of a strictly nonnegative error in an otherwise standard Phillips curve in...