Household Savings in Germany

Axel Börsch-Supan, Anette Reil-Held, Ralf Rodepeter, Reinhold Schnabel and Joachim Winter ()

No 577, Discussion Papers from Institut fuer Volkswirtschaftslehre und Statistik, Abteilung fuer Volkswirtschaftslehre

Abstract: This paper describes how German households save, and how their saving behavior is linked to public policy, notably pension policy. Our analysis is based on a synthetic panel of four cross sections of the German Income and Expenditure Survey ("Einkommens- und Verbrauchsstichproben," EVS), 1978, 1983, 1988 and 1993. The paper carefully distinguishes among several saving measures and concepts. It separates discretionary savings from mandatory savings, and uses two flow measures, namely first the sum of purchases of assets minus the sum of sales of assets, and second the residual of income minus consumption. Our main finding is a hump-shaped age-saving profile. However, savings remain positive in old age, even for most low income households. The generous mandatory German public pension system is a prime candidate to explain this pattern.

Date: 2000
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://madoc.bib.uni-mannheim.de/1034/1/577.pdf

Related works:
Working Paper: Household Savings in Germany (2000)
Working Paper: Household Savings in Germany (2000)
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:mnh:vpaper:1034

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Institut fuer Volkswirtschaftslehre und Statistik, Abteilung fuer Volkswirtschaftslehre Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Katharina Rautenberg ().