Conventional pension systems suffer from a design defect which makes them financially unsustainable, and a source of inefficiency for the economy as a whole. The paper outlines a second-best policy which includes a public pension system made up of two parallel schemes, a Bismarckian one allowing...

Conventional pension systems suffer from a design defect which makes them financially unsustainable, and a source of inefficiency for the economy as a whole. The paper outlines a second-best policy which includes a public pension system made up of two parallel schemes, a Bismarckian one allowing...

This study was prepared by Stefan Lachenmaier while he was working with the Ifo Institute for Economic Research. It was completed in March 2007 and was accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Economics Department of the University of Munich (LMU). The subject of this study is an econometric...

Conventional pension systems suffer from a design defect, which makes them financially unsustainable, and a source of inefficiency for the economy as a whole. The article outlines a second-best policy which includes a public pension system made up of two parallel schemes, a Bismarckian one...

The paper provides empirical evidence for the causal impact of broadband Internet on the economic performance of German firms. Performance is measured in terms of labour productivity and realised process and product innovations. The analysis refers to the early phase of DSL expansion in Germany...

We analyze the link between R&D, innovation, and productivity in MSMEs with a special focus on micro firms with fewer than 10 employees; usually constituting the majority of firms in industrialized economies. Using the German KfW SME panel, we examine to what extent micro firms are different...