Public pay-as-you-go pensions still form the dominant pillar of old-age provision in Germany. This is in marked contrast to the situation in Anglo-Saxon countries. It has advantages if labour markets are strong, e.g., following a quick recovery from the Great Recession. It has disadvantages, as...

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...

In the past, it was customary for both national and international companies to provide different kinds of occupational pension schemes for employees as an additional incentive. Unlike US and Swiss companies, German corporations retained the money collected from occupational pension schemes in...

This paper analyses pension accounting choice in Germany for firms using IFRS or US GAAP. It shows that firms choose the pension discount rate and the treatment of actuarial gains and losses in order to smooth the effect of inherently volatile pension numbers. Pension discount rates for German...

Häufig wird angenommen, Deutschland und andere von demographischen Problemen betroffene Industrieländer könnten Finanzierungsprobleme der Rentenversicherung durch eine stärkere Kapitaldeckung inklusive Anlage dieses Kapitals im Ausland abmildern. Neben der Annahme, dass die Rendite bei...