Since its inception, the traditional form of providing survivor benefits within public pension schemes has lost much of its legitimacy. As a result of fundamental changes in marriage behaviour and the typical division of labour between married spouses, offering non-contributory benefits of this kind could be seen as inequitable. Since these benefits usually substitute for non-derived pension entitlements based on the surviving spouse’s own contributions, they can also lead to incentive effects, especially for married women with some degree of labour-force attachment, that appear to be far from optimal. The present paper highlights this problem referring to institutional details and empirical results related to Germany and shows how it could be resolved by jointly annuitizing a given couple’s pension entitlements.
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Paper provided by CESifo GmbH in its series CESifo Working Paper Series with number
CESifo Working Paper No. 1596.
Find related papers by JEL classification: H55 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Social Security and Public Pensions J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination J22 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Time Allocation and Labor Supply
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Killingsworth, Mark R. & Heckman, James J., 1987.
"Female labor supply: A survey,"
Handbook of Labor Economics,
in: O. Ashenfelter & R. Layard (ed.), Handbook of Labor Economics, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 2, pages 103-204
Elsevier.
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