December 2020

23Dec

Financial Incentives and Heterogeneity in Retirement Behavior An Empirical Analysis Based on SHARE-RV Data

By Nicolas Goll, Felizia Hanemann Over the past few decades, different reforms have come into force, which aim at keeping older workers in the labor market longer. Broad literature to date has investigated reform effects for the average worker. Evidence on the heterogeneous reform effects on different groups is to date however relatively sparse. We therefore evaluate the 1992 pension reform in Germany, which gradually introduced actuarial deductions for early retirement between 1997 and 2004. We investigate whether individuals...

December 23, 2020
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01Dec

German pension savings register growth

Evidence suggests that Germans have taken retirement saving more seriously in the last three years, with the amount of funds set aside for retirement growing as a percentage of total funds. The BVI, Germany’s trade body for fund managers, said the percentage of funds managed by its members for pension provision had grown from 40% three years ago to almost half of the total funds managed now. Funds managed by BVI members for retirement equalled €1,600 billion in the trade...

December 1, 2020
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November 2020

12Nov

German pension system requires tweaks to stand future challenges

The German retirement system will have to continue to adapt to new circumstances through a series of changes to sharpen its private and occupational pensionsprovision, according to panellists speaking at the virtual Handelsblatt annual conference on occupational pensions this week. Measures should be adopted to make savings products “more profitable than today”, if the aim is to rely on private pension provisions, said Dorothea Mohn, head of the financial market team at the organization for the protection of consumers...

November 12, 2020
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October 2020

23Oct

The Changing Nature of Work and Public Pension Coverage: Evidence from the US and Europe

By Axel H. Börsch-Supan, Courtney Coile, Jonathan Cribb, Carl Emmerson, Yuri Pettinicchi We examine non-standard work and its impact on pension coverage via a case study of the US, the UK, and Germany. We find that the share of workers engaged in non-standard work has changed only modestly over time in these three countries, despite the popular perception that a more significant transformation in the nature of work may be underway. We discuss how non-standard work may affect public...

October 23, 2020
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July 2020

21Jul

Germany. Siemens to co-operate with Raisin on pensions

Siemens is cooperating with German fintech Raisin on employee pensions. There has long been a political desire in Germany to provide German residents with an accurate overview of their retirement financing, in order to identify the deficiency in people’s pension in a timely fashion. The pension specialist fairr, part of Berlin-based Raisin, developed a digital “retirement cockpit” along these lines, enabling users to easily track their retirement funds and plan accordingly. Now German manufacturing giant Siemens’ pensions company, Siemens...

July 21, 2020
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June 2020
19Jun

People in Germany are continuing to retire later and later

The average age at which people in Germany enter retirement has risen again over the past year, from 64,1 years in 2018 to 64,3 years in 2019. The age for women was particularly affected, mainly due to the Mother’s Pension II. Pension age for women rises sharply According to the German Pension Insurance Federation (Deutsche Rentenversicherung), the average age at which people start to draw their pensions has risen over the course of the last year. In 2018, the...

June 19, 2020
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April 2020

15Apr

German pensions lifeboat preps for insolvencies burden amid reform

The Pensions-Sicherungs-Verein VVaG (PSVaG), the mutual insurance association for German occupational pension schemes, expects a high number of insolvencies, despite the efforts of the government to mitigate the consequences of the COVID-19 crisis on the economy, board members Marko Brambach and Hans Melchiors have told IPE. “This will also lead to a higher burden for PSV as the legal institution of insolvency protection for company pension schemes,” they said. PSV is the statutory insolvency insurer for occupational pensions in...

April 15, 2020
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March 2020

25Mar

German federation proposes standard product for private pensions

The Federation of German Consumer Organisations – vzbv – and the state of Hesse have proposed a standard product, or Extra Rente, for private pensions to reform the system. The proposal aims to fix some of the problems brought by the privately funded pension system – Riester-Rente – since its introduction almost 20 years ago, precisely at the time when the government coalition weighs up possible changes. Dorothea Mohn, head of the financial market team at Vzbv, told IPE...

March 25, 2020
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07Mar

Employee Representation and the Risk of Corporate Pension Plans

By Nicola Heusel We analyze the effect of direct labour representation in supervisory boards on the risk of corporate pension plans.We exploit employee representation requirements mandated by German labour law and find that firms with parity employee representation reduce pension plan risk both in terms of funding as well as in terms of investment risk. Source: SSRN

March 7, 2020
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January 2020

17Jan

Germany’s other migration wave: the pensioner exodus

As retirement neared a decade ago, German butcher Waldemar Hackstaetter took stock of his finances and concluded he and wife Hildegard couldn't afford to remain in their home country. So they moved to rural Bulgaria, where they knew their combined income of 1,200 euros (£1,026) would buy a lot more. Read Also Greek Authorities to Raise Pensions after Years of Cutbacks "The month stretched further than our pension did (in Germany) and we didn't want to become a burden to...

January 17, 2020
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