Introduced 20 years ago as a part of the 2001 pension reform, the Riester pension is meant to function as an essential component of the German pension system with the aim of compensating for decreasing public pensions. However, data collected by the SOEP show that this objective has not yet been...

Vor 20 Jahren wurde im Zuge der Rentenreform 2001 die Einführung der Riester-Rente beschlossen: Die Riester-Rente sollte ein wesentlicher Baustein des Alterssicherungssystems in Deutschland werden und das sinkende Niveau der gesetzlichen Rentenversicherung mindestens ausgleichen. Daten, die im...

Research on wealth inequality usually focuses on real and financial assets, while pension wealth – the present value of future pension entitlements from public and company pension schemes – receives little attention. This is astonishing, given that pension plans play an important role for...

We provide levels of, compositions of, and inequalities in household augmented wealth - defined as the sum of net worth and pension wealth - for two countries: the United States and Germany. Pension wealth makes up a considerable portion of household wealth: about 48% in the United States and...

Since the enactment of Social Security, the concept of "integration" with Social Security has been a feature of the private pension system. Integration permits employers to take their contributions to Social Security into account and reduce the benefits of low-paid workers in their tax-qualified...

This ERBI Issue Brief/Special Report presents an overview of the most salient administrative issues facing the current Social Security reform debate on potentially adding individual accounts to the program. It argues that comparisons between employment-based retirement savings plans and Social...

Among the far-reaching effects of Social Security reform on the rest of the economy is the impact on private pensions. This paper develops a model of pension plan design that incorporates heterogeneity in tastes for saving and sorting of workers in the labor market. The model is used to analyze...

This study draws lessons for the debate about the proposed partial privatization of Social Security in the United States based on evidence from the United Kingdom. The British case suggests that privatization may lead to a reduction in the pension burden on the national budget if combined with...

The primary motivation for retirement savings policy is the view that many of us, if left to our own devices, will not save enough for retirement. Special tax subsidies for employer-sponsored retirement plans — a principal component of the federal policy scheme — have made such plans the...

In an era of fiscal austerity and dualization of social protection, has organized labor become increasingly split along skill and industry lines? Against recent political science accounts of trade union involvement in social policy-making, this paper argues that, in the specific area of...