December 01, 2011 | News

Congratulations!

On November 30, 2011 MPIDR Research Fellow Anika Rasner defended her doctoral thesis with the title "The Distribution of Pension Wealth and the Process of Pension Building - Augmenting Survey Data with Administrative Pension Records by Statistical Matching" at the Technische Universität Berlin.

In her doctoral thesis Anika Rasner focused on two empirical research topics: First, the quantitative relevance of social security wealth in the individual's total wealth holdings in Germany. Second, the impact of marital trajectories on the accumulation of pension rights over the life course of women in Germany and the U.S. The results indicate that women who got divorced, in particular those who got divorced later in life, accumulated very low pension entitlements on their own and are left with too little time to close the gap to never married women who have the highest entitlements.

The empirical analyses were made possible because of the development of a new statistical matching procedure that allows for the combination of data from different sources. In the thesis, data from the Socio-economic Panel (SOEP) were linked with administrative pension records from the statutory pension insurance. Anika Rasner's thesis was supervised by Gert G. Wagner, chairman of the executive board of the German Institute for Economic Research and the MPIDR director James W. Vaupel.