Throughout the world, population aging is a major challenge that will continue well into the 21st century. While the patterns of the demographic transition are similar in most countries, timing differs substantially, in particular between industrialized and less developed countries. To the...

This paper describes how German households save, and how their saving behavior is linked to public policy, notably pension policy. Our analysis is based on a synthetic panel of four cross sections of the German Income and Expenditure Survey ("Einkommens- und Verbrauchsstichproben," EVS), 1978,...

Germany has one of the most generous public pension and health insurance systems of the world, yet private savings are high until old age. Savings remain positive in old age, even for most low income households. How can we explain what we might want to term the "German savings puzzle"? We...

Drei Entwicklungen werden die Sozialpolitik des neuen Jahrhunderts in Deutschland prägen: die Alterung der Bevölkerung, die zunehmende Mobilität und Farbigkeit der Lebens- und Erwerbshistorien sowie der Wertewandel, der die Sozialleistungen des Staates zunehmend Dienstleistungen gleichstellt....

Can the aging problem be solved by a higher birth rate? While the popular notion -"if we have too many elderly we need more children in order to compensate for this"- seems plausible, the results of economic theory are ambiguous at best. This paper employs a quantitative macroeconomic simulation...