How can retirement savings be increased? We explore a unique policy change in the context of the German pension system to study this question. As of 2005 (with a phase-in period between 2002-04), the German pension administration started to send out annual letters providing detailed and...

With this paper we seek to contribute to the literature on pension insurance systems. The financial literature tends to focus exclusively on the US pension insurance system. This is the first major empirical study to address the German occupational pension insurance (PSVaG) plan in Germany. The...

Demographic change causes an undersupply of financial old age benefits within the statutory pay-as-you-go pension system in Germany. Therefore, the provision of occupational as well as private pensions has to be enhanced. However, there seems to be an undersupply of occupational pension...

Public pay-as-you-go pensions still form the dominant pillar of old-age provision in Germany. This is in marked contrast to the situation in Anglo-Saxon countries. It has advantages if labour markets are strong, e.g., following a quick recovery from the Great Recession. It has disadvantages, as...

This paper uses administrative data to investigate how a change in pension wealth affects a mother’s employment decision after child birth. I exploit the extension of the child care pension benefit in 1992 as a natural experiment in a regression discontinuity design to estimate short- and...

Demographic change causes an undersupply of financial old age benefits within the statutory pay-as-you-go pension system in Germany. Therefore, the provision of occupational as well as private pensions has to be enhanced. However, there seems to be an undersupply of occupational pension...

Relationships between individual traits and savings decisions vary geographically. Understanding the structure of such relationships is interesting in general, but it is particularly important in the case of the Germany, where the pension reform of 2001 significantly decreased the level of...