This paper employs a large scale overlapping generations (OLG) model with endogenous education to evaluate the quantitative role of human capital adjustments for the economic consequences of demographic change. We find that endogenous human capital formation is an important adjustment mechanism...

Many motives for saving a portion of one’s income co-exist and their relative importance changes over the life-cycle. However, most existing work focuses on only one of those motives and makes simplifying assumptions about the other motives so that they can be relegated to the background....

Der Abbau der Schwankungsreserve war in jüngster Zeit wieder einmal Gegenstand der politischen Diskussionen zur Stabilisierung des Rentenversicherungsbeitragssatzes. Im folgenden wird die Funktion der Schwankungsreserve näher untersucht und berechnet, in welchem Umfang sie vorgehalten werden...

Die Kontroverse über die „richtigen“ Zu- und Abschläge in der GRV beginnt mit mehreren Begriffsverwirrungen. Dies betrifft vor allem die Begriffe „versicherungsmathematisch fair“, „versicherungsmathematisch neutral“ und „anreizkompatibel“. Nur...

Abel (2002) proposes a resolution of the riskfree rate and the equity premium puzzles by considering pessimism and doubt. Pessimism is characterized by subjective probabilistic beliefs about asset returns that are stochastically dominated by the objective distribution of these returns. The...

The paper studies the relevance of gender ideology for the geographic mobility of families using data from the German Socio-economic Panel. The analysis proceeds in two steps. First, it is shown single men and women – who are in some sense "unconstrained" optimizers – reveal...

We examine financial literacy in Germany using data from the SAVE survey. We find that knowledge of basic financial concepts is lacking among women, the less educated, and those living in East Germany. In particular, those with low education and low income in East Germany have little financial...

Soziale Ungleichheit im Gesundheitsverhalten ist ein in der Gesundheitssoziologie viel diskutiertes Forschungsfeld, wobei gesundheitlichen Vorsorgeuntersuchungen bisher eher wenig Aufmerksamkeit zukam. Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht für drei Vorsorgeuntersuchungen, ob die Teilnahme nach...

Mortgages constitute the largest part of household debt. An essential choice when taking out a mortgage is between fixed-interest-rate mortgages (FRMs) and adjustable-interest-rate mortgages (ARMs). However, so far, no comprehensive cross-country study has analyzed what determines household...