Rates of Return and Early Retirement Disincentives: Evidence from a German Pension Reform

To counteract the financial pressure emerging in aging societies, statutory pension schemes are undergoing fundamental reforms in many Western countries. Starting with cohort 1937, Germany introduced permanent pension deductions for early retirement. This study examines the profitability of pension contributions against the background of this reform for cohorts 1935–1945. Internal rates of return (IRR) are used to measure the profitability. For men, the IRR declines from 2.4% to 1.2% and for women from 5.2% to 3.7%. The results suggest that the majority of the trend, about 75–80%, is caused by increased pension contributions and not by the reform.     

Employment to output elasticities and reforms towards flexicurity: Evidence from OECD countries

Labor market reforms in the direction of “flexicurity” have been widely endorsed as a means to increase an economy's ability to adjust to negative shocks while offering adequate social safety nets. This paper empirically examines how such reforms influence employment's responsiveness to output fluctuations (employment–output elasticity). To address this question, we employ a single equation error correction model with policy interactions on a panel of OECD countries, which also incorporates the period of the Great Recession, and distinguish between passive and active labor market policy types. Flexicurity is represented by three policy measures: unemployment benefit generosity, the flexibility of hiring and firing rules, and spending on active labor market policies. We find that the effects of any single policy change are shaped by the broader existing policy mix within which it takes place. A hypothetical flexicurity reform towards the policy mix of Denmark, a well-known example of the flexicurity regime, is found to increase or leave unchanged countries' short-run employment–output elasticities, depending on the initial policy mix. These results are robust to accounting for a large set of additional labor market institutions.     

Die Bewertung von Handelsrisiken eines Übertragungsnetzbetreibers anhand einer Monte-Carlo-Simulation

EnBW Transportnetze AG (TNG) is the transmission system operator (TSO) of Energie Baden-Württemberg AG. Due to the Renewable Energy Sources Act, the TSOs are obliged to take-up the (fluctuating) complete amount of electricity made of renewable resources. The TSOs have to transform this feeding into a constant output. Therefore, TNG has started trading on the European Power Exchange. The amount of electricity needed to be bought and sold respectively in order to create a constant output involves risks because of price volatility. As a result of the merit-order-effect, these risks increase. Due to this effect, procurement costs generally exceed sales revenues despite of well-balanced quantitative electricity tradings. For evaluating the procurement and merchandise risk at the intraday market, a Monte-Carlo-Simulation is executed on the basis of historical turnover data.     

Growth convergence reconsidered

Growth Rate Convergence Reconsidered. —While convergence properties lie at the heart of the endogenous-exogenous growth debate, the empirical literature on convergence to date remains ambiguous. Results appear to be particularly sensitive to the choice of income per capita or labor productivity as dependent variable. The paper shows that the dependence reflects a measurement error arising from the interdependence of human capital accumulation, labor force participation rates and development levels. Estimation of a corrected convergence equation yields results generally supporting convergence except in the manufacturing sector.     

Die doppelte Herausforderung: Klimaschutz und Konjunkturpolitik

Viele L?nder haben infolge der Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrise Konjunkturprogramme verabschiedet, die gleichzeitig auch den Klimaschutz vorantreiben sollen. Beide wirtschaftspolitischen Instrumente unterscheiden sich aber in ihrer Wirkung. Konjunkturpolitische Instrumente sollen kurzfristig punktgenau eingesetzt werden, w?hrend klimapolitische Instrumente l?ngerfristig ausgelegt sind. Holger Techert zeigt, unter welchen Bedingungen Zielkonfl ikte entstehen.