Demographic change presents major financing problems for the pay-as-you-go pension system. In response to these problems, the 2001 and 2004 German pension reforms reduced the statutory level of benefits from the pay-as-you system. The resulting pension gap is supposed to be filled by funded...

Germany is not a country of stock holders – but this may change. This paper analyses the main trends in stockholding – either directly or indirectly through mutual funds and other managed investment accounts – among German households. We find a significant shift towards riskier portfolios...

literature on precautionary saving provides contradictory views on the importance of precautionary saving. The SAVE data offer the possibility to generate some of the frequently used instruments known from the literature in order to measure the extent of precautionary savings. This paper...

Saving is frequently measured using a one-shot question for total annual saving dur-ing the preceding year. This type of one-shot recall question might cause severe measurement errors since saving is a complicated concept which consists of various components, many of which respondents might not...

We analyze nonresponse to questions on financial items such as income and asset holdings in household surveys using data from a controlled field experiment. As part of the SAVE study, a representative survey conducted in Germany in 2001, questions on household income and financial assets were...

This paper describes the general design of the SAVE survey: the design of the questionnaire, inter-viewer and interviewee motivation, and the sampling designs of the various subsamples collected in 2001 and 2003. It discusses the representativeness of the data, explains the construction of...

General purpose surveys typically refrain from using an exhaustive list of consump-tion expenditure items since the gain of more precise data on consumption is usually more than offset by the large increase in interview time and respondent effort which reduces re-sponse willingness. An...

This paper presents selected highlights drawn from the German SAVE surveys in 2001 and 2003, expanding the findings of Börsch-Supan and Essig (2003) along three lines. First, it analyses the households' assessment of their general, economic and financial well-being in the past, present and...