Demographic change causes an undersupply of financial old age benefits within the statutory pay-as-you-go pension system in Germany. Therefore, the provision of occupational as well as private pensions has to be enhanced. However, there seems to be an undersupply of occupational pension provision particularly in small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Using survey data of the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) and the German SAVE survey, the present paper studies econometrically the determinants of occupational pension provision in Germany. It shows that occupational pensions depend not only on supply-side factors such as firm size and industry, but also on demand-side factors such as individual sociodemo-graphic attributes and people's savings motives.

Economic and demographic pressures may lead Social Security systems and employers to reduce their pensions in the future. Can delaying retirement help preserve welfare in that context? We examine this question with a life-cycle framework which includes the utility from leisure. One unique feature of our model is that it lets the retirement date be endogenously determined, unless an external constraint or shock applies first. By solving this model we find that, in reasonable scenarios, working longer does little to mitigate the negative impact of pension reductions on welfare. Building on our model, we suggest strategies to enhance the effectiveness of policies designed to induce and enable longer working lives.

The objective of the paper is to identify the determinants of the market share of each AFJP and the matrix of direct and cross price elasticities, by using a discrete choice model of product differentiation, based on the random utility theory. The results obtained from the estimation of a simple logit model using a panel of quarterly data between December of 1995 and June of 2006 shows the existence of two competitive mechanisms used by firms: prices and a vector of variables explaining horizontal differentiation, such as quantity of branches and salesman. The estimation of the nested-logit model supports the hypothesis of sequential election, where firms are chosen by their price setting strategies, defining two groups of competitors. Finally, the regulatory change that eliminates fixed commissions provides additional importance to prices signals in consumers' utility.

This paper empirically examines the role of expected rate of return on pension assets reported under SFAS 87 as a tool for meeting and beating earnings targets and its effect on firm value. Results suggest that managers may use this pension assumption to inflate earnings per share (eps) when they are going to miss the earnings expectations. The earnings inflation is directly related to the amount by which earnings will miss the target and to earning sensitivity to expected return on pension asset assumption. The results are robust to two different measures of earnings inflation and two of earnings expectations.

The market behaves semi-efficiently and appears to adjust the firm value for large earnings inflations and in situations where firms have incentives to manipulate earnings or earnings are highly sensitive to expected rate of return on pension assets. However, this adjustment is not complete and post-announcement returns continue to depend on the inflated component of earnings, confirming that resource allocation decisions are based on managed earnings. Additional disclosure requirements to make pension assumptions more transparent are also discussed in the paper. Such disclosures could enhance the efficient use of the information by market participants.

Debate over superiority of pension funding over pay-as-you-go links notably to the question whether funding improves economic performance sufficiently to generate additional resources to meet the needs of an ageing population. To address this issue, we design a modified Cobb–Douglas production function with pension assets as a shift factor, and investigate the direct link between pension assets and economic growth employing a dataset covering up to 38 countries, using a variety of appropriate econometric methods. We find positive results for both OECD countries and Emerging Market Economies (EMEs), with consistent evidence for a larger effect for EMEs than OECD countries.