摘要：In 1997 Chancellor Kohl proposed a major pension reform: he pushed the law
through Parliament explaining that the German PAYG system had become
unsustainable. One limitation of the new law - one that is crucial for our
identification strategy - is that it left the generous pension entitlements of
civil servants intact. The year after, in 1998, Kohl lost the elections and was
replaced by Gerhard Shroeder. One of the first decisions of the new Chancellor
was to revoke of the 1997 pension reform. We use the quasi-experiment of the
adoption and subsequent revocation of the pension reform to study how households
reacted to the increase in uncertainty about the future path of income that such
an event produced. Our estimates are obtained from a diff-in-diff estimator:
this helps us overcome the identification problem that often affects measures of
precautionary saving. Departing from the majority of studies on precautionary
saving we also analyze households' response in terms of labor market choices: we
find evidence of a labor supply response by those workers who can use the margin
offered by part-time employment.
