Over the past years, the financial situation and the retirement prospects of the so-called babyboomers (people born during the demographic Post-World War II baby-boom) have become source of public concern and has attracted a great deal of attention in the US. In Germany, on the contrary, the...

The planned increase of the insurance periods recognized for bringing up children (Mütterrente) will increase the pension contribution rate by an average of 0.3 percentage points and reduce the gross pension level by an average of 0.4 percentage points by 2018. However, since government...

There is an increasing interest among social scientists in merging survey data with administrative records from social security institutions. Record linkage represents one way to combine different sources using a unique identifier such as the Social Security number. The informed consent of the...

Understanding how households form their long-term saving and investment decisions to shoulder risks not covered by social security systems has been of primary importance in all the countries which, like Germany, introduced major reforms to face the challenges of an aging population. This paper...