Do Retirement Savings Increase in Response to Information About Retirement and Expected Pensions?

Mathias Dolls, Philipp Dörrenberg, Andreas Peichl and Holger Stichnoth
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Philipp Doerrenberg

No 6842, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: How can retirement savings be increased? We explore a unique policy change in the context of the German pension system to study this question. As of 2005 (with a phase-in period between 2002-04), the German pension administration started to send out annual letters providing detailed and comprehensible information about the pension system and individual expected public pension payments. This reform did not change the level of pensions, but only provided information to individuals about their expected pension payments. Using German tax return data, we exploit an age discontinuity to identify the effect of these letters on the behavior of individuals. We find an increase in tax-deductible private retirement savings and provide evidence that this is not due to a crowding-out of other forms of savings. We also show that labor earnings, i.e. the most direct way to increase public pensions, increase after receiving the letter.

Keywords: pensions; savings; information letters; earnings (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D14 H24 H55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-dem, nep-lma and nep-pbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (64)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp6842.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Do retirement savings increase in response to information about retirement and expected pensions? (2018)
Working Paper: Do retirement savings increase in response to information about retirement and expected pensions? (2018)
Chapter: Do Retirement Savings Increase in Response to Information about Retirement and Expected Pensions? (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_6842

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().