Provisions for old age
Income provisions and retirement
Tatjana Mika, Uwe Rehfeld, Michael Stegmann
Federal German Pension Fund
(tatjana.mika[at]drv-bund.de; uwe.rehfeld[at]drv-bund.de; michael.stegmann[at]drv-bund.de)
Abstract
Research on the income situation of today’s and future retirees requires often
record based data. Because of their accuracy in the life-course infomation they can
also, if they are linked to survey data, make interviews shorter and less demanding
for the interviewed persons. Process produced data from the pension fund are
already available for these research topics. The data include details about the
employment career and other life-course events as far as they are considered in the
pensions’ calculation. Nevertheless, additional sources are needed if research
projects address the income situation more in detail, in particular the question of
poverty or high income in old age. The pension reforms of the past decade have
strengthened the second and third pillar in the importance, thereby increasing their
importance of occupational pensions and private savings for future old age income.
There exist already some detailed and inclusive data for research on old age income
and retirement collected for government reports, but not all this data is yet available
for scientific research. Furthermore should the exchange of data between social
securitiy and/or tax institutions more often be combined with the collection of
statistical data in order to improve the possibility of record-to-record linkage.
Keywords: Retirement, old age provisions, public pension fund, process
produced data, data linkage