The upcoming demographic crisis in Germany demands fundamentalreforms of the pension system. In a democracy, reforms are, however, onlyfeasible when they are supported by the majority of the electorate. Todetermine whether the majority is in favor of reforms of the pension system,we calculate...

Not sufficiently harmonised national pension systems within the European Union distort the allocation of labour and endanger redistributive activities. This paper identifies the most decentralised level of harmonisation which guarantees efficient allocation and enables redistribution. For this,...

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...

Pension systems in most industrialised countries are unfunded, i.e. they are pay-as-you-go financed and thus depend on a well-balanced ratio (old) recipients to (young) contributors. This so-called dependency ratio will worsen significantly in the next few decades due to two developments: ageing...

Demographic change has an impact on pay-as-you-go pension systems. To maintain their financial sustainability, reforms are necessary, but often lack public support. Based on representative survey data from Germany, we conduct a survey experiment which allows investigating whether salience of or...

It is shown that the net fiscal externality created by an additional member of a Pay-as-you-go-pension system that is endowed with individual accounts equals the gross contribution of this member. In Germany, this is an amount of about DM 175,000. The paper uses this information to design a...