Survivor Benefits and the Gender Tax-Gap in Public Pension Schemes Work: Incentives and Options for Reform

Arbeitspapier

Since its inception, the traditional form of providing survivor benefits through 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 can not only be seen as inequitable. Since they usually substitute for non-derived pension entitlements based on the survivant 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 based on empirical estimates regarding the wage elasticities of labour supply for German females vs males and shows how it could be resolved by installing a joint annuitisation of a given couple’s pension entitlements.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: ifo Working Paper ; No. 7

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Social Security and Public Pensions ; Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination ; Time Allocation and Labor Supply
• Subject: Public pension ; survivor benefits ; female labour supply ; optimal taxation

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Werding, Martin
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich
• (where): Munich
• (when): 2005

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/73821
• Last update: 01.04.2025, 12:04 PM CEST