International comparisons of national social policy rely overwhelmingly on programme spending ratios. However, there are widespread problems with this type of data as an indicator of trends in societies' commitments to social protection. This paper suggests an alternative approach to...

This paper investigates the inter-temporal structure of implicit taxes that arise in unfunded pension schemes. We demonstrate that these tax rates are declining over the life cycle. Using German micro-data for men and married women we estimate periodic wage elasticities of labour supply in order...