May 2021
06May

Germany hatches plan to attract green investment capital

The German government is planning a new green financing strategy to steer capital towards environmental projects and developing Germany into a leading hub for sustainable finance, plans seen by Reuters show. The so-called Sustainable Finance Strategy plan lists 26 individual measures and is due to be adopted by the cabinet on Wednesday with a view to mobilising investment for climate protection projects. "The federal government wants to develop Germany into a leading location for sustainable finance," states the plan, which is...

May 6, 2021
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April 2021
01Apr

Reference Points for Retirement Behavior: Evidence from German Pension Discontinuities

By Arthur Seibold This paper documents and analyzes an important and puzzling stylized fact about retirement behavior: the large concentration of job exits at specific ages. In Germany, almost 30% of workers retire precisely in the month when they reach one of three statutory retirement ages, although there is often no incentive or even a disincentive to retire at these thresholds. To study what can explain the concentration of retirements around statutory ages, I use novel administrative data covering the...

April 1, 2021
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February 2021
25Feb

Germany. Vantik and Mastercard simplify saving for retirement with new debit card

Financial security in retirement is one of the most urgent issues in Germany and Europe. In order to offer people a simple access to savings for retirement, the Berlin-based Fintech Vantik announces a partnership with Mastercard and the banking-as-a-service-platform Vodeno. The heart of the cooperation is the combination of a free debit Mastercard with long-term savings: users of the Vantikcard receive 1% cashback on every purchase, which are automatically invested into a sustainable pension fund. Saving for retirement is thus...

February 25, 2021
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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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