Abstract
This paper provides evidence on the question of who bears the burden of social security contributions (SSC) in Germany over a long-term horizon. Following Alvaredo et al. (De Econ, 2017) we exploit kinks in the budget set generated by a drop in the marginal SSC rate at earnings caps for health and long-term care insurance. These concave kinks lead to discontinuities in the distributions of gross earnings, net earnings, or labor costs which—in the absence of labor supply responses—are informative about economic incidence. Administrative data for West Germany from 1975 to 2010 facilitate a comprehensive incidence analysis. Finding no evidence for labor supply responses and no significant discontinuities in gross earnings distributions, we conclude that neither employers nor employees shift a substantial part of their SSC burden. These results are consistent over the whole time period and hold for several robustness checks corroborating previous findings for Germany. A small trend towards a slight increase in the SSC burden for employees is not statistically significant.
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Source: German Statistical Office; own calculations
Source: ICTWSS: Database on Institutional Characteristics of Trade Unions, Wage Setting, State Intervention and Social Pacts in 51 countries between 1960 and 2014 (figures for 1970–1990, see http://www.uva-aias.net/208); German Establishment Panel (figures for 2000–2010, see Fischer et al. 2008, 2009)
Source: SIAB; own calculations
Source: SIAB; own calculations
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Notes
The German name is Stichprobe der Integrierten Arbeitsmarktbiografien. See Dorner et al. (2011) for a detailed description of the data.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Peter Haan who read and commented on an earlier draft of this paper. We are also indepted to Stuart Adam, Leon Bettendorf, Nicole Bosch, Antoine Bozio, Thomas Breda, Julien Grenet, Luke Haywood, and Barra Roantree for helpful comments and discussions. This research has been conducted within the project “The Impact of Social Security Contributions on Earnings: Evidence from administrative data in France, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK” (HA 5526/3-1 (ORA)) funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG).
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Müller, KU., Neumann, M. Who Bears the Burden of Social Security Contributions in Germany? Evidence from 35 Years of Administrative Data. De Economist 165, 165–179 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10645-017-9298-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10645-017-9298-3