Abstract
AbstractGermany is one of the few countries in Europe that has implemented a system of ‘divorce splitting’. Under this system, the pension credits that spouses have accumulated during their marriage are combined and then split equally between them upon divorce. This study examines how divorce affects public pension entitlements in Germany, and how these patterns are influenced by the system of divorce splitting. The data for our analysis comes from SHARE-RV, a direct linkage of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) with administrative data of the research data centre of the German Pension Insurance Fund (Deutsche Rentenversicherung Bund). The data include information on the beneficiaries’ monthly earnings and employment biographies, as well as on their pension entitlements and the credits they received through divorce splitting. The results of the analysis, which was restricted to West German men and women born between 1935 and 1954, reveal that there are large gender gaps in public pension benefit levels. However, the investigation also shows that single and divorced West German women have larger personal pension entitlements than their married or widowed counterparts. Furthermore, the public pension entitlements of divorced men and women in West Germany are very similar. This can be attributed partially to the divorce-splitting system, which tends to increase the pension benefits of divorced women, while reducing the pension benefits of their male counterparts.
Highlights
The modern welfare state evolved at a time when work and family life were strongly gendered (Flora and Heidenheimer, 1981; Kolberg, 1991; Orloff, 1996)
Divorce and separation were not yet widespread when the modern welfare state came into being at the end of the 19th century, or when it was consolidated after the Second World War (Pierson, 2004)
Based on the interaction models, we show how the gender pension gap evolved across cohorts, and how it differed by marital status
Summary
The modern welfare state evolved at a time when work and family life were strongly gendered (Flora and Heidenheimer, 1981; Kolberg, 1991; Orloff, 1996). Keck et al (2017) have compared the effects of divorce splitting on different pension cohorts; i.e. on women and men who entered retirement age in the same year.
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