A Narrative Account of Legislated Social Security Changes for Germany

Sebastian Gechert, Christoph Paetz () and Paloma Villanueva

No 170-2016, IMK Working Paper from IMK at the Hans Boeckler Foundation, Macroeconomic Policy Institute

Abstract: Exploiting official historical records of the German Bundestag and Bundesrat, the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs and the German statutory pension insurance scheme, we construct a narrative of legislated social security changes for Germany between 1970 and 2013 in order to identify important discretionary shocks to the social security system. The historical account covers major changes in transfers and social security benefits and contributions for pensions, health care, long-term care and unemployment insurance on the German federal level and thus complements the tax narrative of Uhl (2013). Based on the provided information we are able to code a rich bottom-up time-series of fiscal policy shocks for empirical macroeconomic analysis, addressing the identification problem. Therefore, we collect information regarding the underlying motivation, the dates of the legislative process and the prospective financial impact, closely following the methodology of Romer and Romer (2010) and Uhl (2013).

Keywords: Narrative Record Identification; Action-Based Approach; Social Security (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E62 H20 H30 H55 N00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 104 pages
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-his, nep-ias and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.boeckler.de/pdf/p_imk_wp_170_2016.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:imk:wpaper:170-2016

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IMK Working Paper from IMK at the Hans Boeckler Foundation, Macroeconomic Policy Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sabine Nemitz ().