Estimating saving and fertility simultaneously by VAR method, we find that social security cover has a positive effect on household saving, and a negative effect on fertility. In Germany, as in other countries where the hypothesis was tested, social security is thus good for growth. A possible...

Studies of the welfare state usually try to find out which factors have contributed to its ascendancy since the end of the nineteenth century and which factors explain the various approaches different countries took in providing a new social insurance to cover new social risks in industrialized...

We ask whether a PAYG-financed social security system is welfare improving in an economy with idiosyncratic and aggregate risk. We argue that interactions between the two risks are important for this question. One is a direct interaction in the form of a countercyclical variance of idiosyncratic...