Germany has one of the most generous public pension and health insurance systems of the world, yet private savings are high and remain positive until old age, even for most low income households. How can we explain what we might want to term the \"German savings puzzle\"? We provide a...

This paper discusses the consequences of population aging and a fundamental pension reform - that is, a shift towards more pre-funding - for capital markets in Germany. We use a stylized closed-economy, overlapping-generations model to compare the effects of the recent German pension reform with...

Can the aging problem be solved by a higher birth rate? While the popular notion - \"if we have too many elderly we need more children in order to compensate for this\" - seems plausible, the results of economic theory are ambiguous at best. This paper employs a quantitative macroeconomic...