Are social security institutions as pay-as-you-go systems permitted to accrue reserves? If so, how high might the reserves be? And how can the risk of misuse be prevented? This article attempts to answer these questions and to show options, how social security reserve funds should be dealt with....

The pension reforms of the beginning of this century left their marks. The pension level has dropped sharply. Compared with 1989 results suggest a reduction of almost 14 percent nowadays. Further reductions are announced with the consequence of threatening old age poverty particularly for low...

Within the framework of the overall evaluation of family-related benefits, the Allensbach Institute completed two acceptance analyses in 2010 and 2011 on the population’s familiarity with and assessments of 16 different state benefits intended to support families, along with benefit claiming...

Employees have a right to use occupational pension schemes through earnings conversion. This is one means to compensate the declining level of benefits of the statutory pension insurance. The article presents the regulation of these schemes, discusses problems of the interplay of public...

A new born child has on average a three months longer life expectancy than a newborn of the previous year. Consequences of these gains in life expectancy are-in the case of a constant statutory retirement age-increasing pay-out-periods in the PAYGS. The retirement age of 67 tries to cover the...

The distributional effect of the increase in the compulsory retirement age depends markedly on the individual employment history and the labor market situation. Based on model simulations and administrative data (Scientific Use Files der Rentenzugangsstatistik 2006) we analyze the income effect...

All across the world, pension systems are undergoing considerable change. Public pension systems have been reformed and parts of the formerly public social provision have been shifted to market based provisions. The normative pretensions of European welfare states, however, remain unchanged...

To ensure the sustainability of public pension finances in light of the increase in life-expectancy Germany as well as other OECD countries have decided to raise the statutory retirement age. Against this background, this paper presents the main trends of the development of pensionable ages in...

We employ data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to examine the income distribution for elderly individuals since German unification. The elderly population, defined as people of age 55 and older, is decomposed by people resident in the Old and New Federal States. Further, we distinguish...

The aftermath of the economic crisis and the burden of the fiscal stimulus packages call for considerable consolidation efforts by federal and state governments to meet the goal of a structurally balanced budget as required by the German debt brake in the medium-run. However, the real challenge...