The book analyzes the German welfare state. It starts from a theoretical perspective and then develops changes in social security, public health care, and unemployment insurance.

The statutory pension insurance system is set up according to the principle of participatory equivalence. This principle seeks to hold pension claims at a specific ratio to paid contributions so that a redistribution of income does not take place. In truth, however, there is a massive...

Die gesetzliche Rentenversicherung ist nach dem Prinzip der Teilhabe-Äquivalenz aufgebaut. Dies soll bewirken, dass die Rentenansprüche in einer bestimmten Relation zu den gezahlten Beiträgen stehen, also vorrangig keine Umverteilung stattfindet. In Wahrheit gibt es jedoch eine massive...

It is now a commonplace that the unfunded public pension systems of many OECD countries will run into severe financing problems in the coming decades due to a dramatically increasing pensioner/worker ratio. While this diagnosis is completely undisputed, there is still a vigorous debate on the...

Declining fertility and increasing longevity have rendered public pension systems in many OECD countries unsustainable and have triggered substantial reforms of these systems. One of the officially declared reform objectives is to raise the average retirement age. Crucial parameters for this...

In several OECD countries, public pay-as-you-go financed pension systems have undergone major reforms in which future retirement benefit promises have been scaled down. A consequence of these reforms is that especially in countries with a tight tax-benefit linkage, the retirement benefit claims...

Citizens and politicians rely on their knowledge of a pension system, particularly its redistributive features, when forming their preferences and evaluating its fairness. Taking advantage of the Bismarckian rule of proportionality in Germany, we provide experimental and survey-based evidence...

In a recent paper, Homburg and Richter have argued that with free mobility of labor within a common labor market there is a need to harmonize and even consolidate pay-as-you-go financed national public pension systems to reach an efficient allocation of labor. We show that with free and...