The Dutch mandatory pension system consists of two parts: a public pay-as-you-go part that provides a minimum income to all Dutch inhabitants over age 64; and an occupation-specific capital-funded part that provides supplementary retirement income. The goal of this paper is to test for the effect...

It is now a commonplace that the unfunded public pension systems of many OECD countries will run into severe financing problems in the coming decades due to a dramatically increasing pensioner/worker ratio. While this diagnosis is completely undisputed, there is still a vigorous debate on the...

In May 2001, Germany adopted a fundamental pension reform cutting back public pensions and introducing personal pension accounts. The paper critically reviews the reform decisions and evaluates their long-term viability. It is shown that the adjustment of the Public Pension Scheme misses the...

Most young households simultaneously hold both unsecured debt on which they pay an average of 10 percent interest and social security wealth on which they earn less than 2 percent. We document this fact using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We then consider a life-cycle model with...

Angesichts der demographischen Entwicklung in Deutschland ist eine grundlegende Reform der Gesetzlichen Rentenversicherung unumgänglich. Es ist schon jetzt absehbar, dass die Rentenreform 2000/01 nicht ausreicht, um das deutsche Alterssicherungssystem langfristig zu stabilisieren. Nach Angaben...

Die gesetzliche Rentenversicherung verpflichtet nahezu alle Beschäftigten zu Beitragszahlungen von derzeit 19,5 Prozent ihrer Bruttolöhne. Zusätzlich werden über allgemeine Steuern etwa 9 Prozent des Bruttoeinkommens zur Finanzierung der gesetzlichen Renten verwandt. Dennoch ist aufgrund der...

In the present paper the effects of different pay-as-you-go pension systems on fertility decisions of a representative household are examined. Thereby, the analysis focuses especially on the interplay of parental quantity and quality decisions, introduced by Becker (1960). As it will be shown, a...

Das Ziel dieses Artikels besteht in der Auseinandersetzung mit diesen konzeptionellen Bedenken sowie der Darstellung eines konkreten Vorschlags für eine Reform des gesetzlichen Rentenversicherungssystems. Hierzu wird zunächst gezeigt, dass der dem Umlageverfahren zugrunde liegende...

In this paper we identify conditions under which the introduction of a pay-as-you-go social security system is ex-ante Pareto-improving in a stochastic overlapping generations economy with capital accumulation and land. We argue that these conditions are consistent with many calibrations of the...

A pay-as-you-go (paygo) pension program may provide intergenerational pooling of risks to individuals' labor and capital income over the life cycle. By means of a model that provides illuminating closed form solutions, we demonstrate that the magnitude of the optimal paygo program and the nature...