This paper focuses on the empirically observed relationship between demographic change and inflation and explores the theoretical nature of the puzzling link between the two. It puts the existent disparate empirical findings in the literature into perspective by formalizing an...

The aim and scope of this paper is to isolate the effects of population ageing in the context of potential Scottish independence. Fiscal challenges are often quoted as a strong argument against independence. Demographic processes play an important role in determining future economic growth via...

Ongoing demographic change will lead to a relative scarcity of raw labor to the effect that output growth will be decreasing in the next decades, a secular stagnation. As physical capital will be relatively abundant, this decrease of output will be accompanied by reductions of asset returns. We...

Recent reforms that aim at reducing the upcoming burdens of population ageing might seriously harm low income individuals. An increase in old-age poverty and disability will be the result. Under this prospect, the present paper quantitatively characterizes the optimal progressivity of unfunded...

This paper presents an overlapping generations model where agents face labor-income and health risks in order to quantify the macroeconomic and welfare consequences of reform options for the German health insurance system. In addition to labor supply, consumption and savings, households also...

The present paper aims to quantify efficiency properties of real world social security systems of various institutional designs in order to identify an optimal pension design. Starting from a benchmark economy without social security, we introduce alternative pension systems and compare the...

This paper presents an overlapping generations model with occupational choice that allows for entrepreneurial exit, entry and investment decisions in the presence of idiosyncratic productivity risk and borrowing constraints. The model is applied to analyze the consequences of three pension...

This paper analyzes behavioral responses to a reform in the German public pension system that allowed individuals with a long contribution history to retire without deductions before reaching the regular retirement age. Following the 2014 reform, individuals with 45 contribution years could...

Providing a decent living standard and preventing old-age poverty are the two major challenges of pension insurance schemes. Replacement rates below the poverty line despite many years of contribution represent a major challenge for public pension schemes with respect to the systems "raison...

Germany entered the euro with a current account deficit but over the entire past decade has run large and persistent current account surpluses. Besides joining the common currency, the increase of Germany's current account since the late 1990s has been accompanied by strong shifts in the...