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Germany 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.
This cumulative dissertation investigates the relationship between divorce and economic wellbeing from a life course perspective in West Germany and Sweden. The analyses are based on large-scale register data from the German public pension and the Swedish population registers. The first paper studies mothers’ earnings trajectories from one year before their first childbirth until ten years after in both countries. Separation negatively affects mothers’ earnings trajectories in Sweden, while it positively affects them in West Germany. In Sweden, although the earnings of separated mothers lag behind those of partnered mothers, both groups can surpass their pre-birth earnings, which is not the case for either separated or partnered mothers from western Germany.
The second paper investigates how divorce relates to retirement trajectories, defined as the monthly insurance history from age 50 to age 65 of women and men in West Germany. Divorcees are more likely than married to retire through unstable retirement trajectories characterised by receipt of reduced-earnings-capacity pensions and unemployment. Whereas the relationship between divorce and retirement trajectories seems to be overall adverse for men, it is more ambiguous for women. Some divorced women are also more likely than married women to retire through a stable high-income trajectory.
The third paper compares the gendered consequences of divorce on public pension income in both countries. Divorced women from West Germany have significantly higher public pension incomes than married women. The German ‘divorce splitting’ mechanism increases women’s and decreases men’s pension incomes, which contributes to equalising their public pension incomes. In Sweden, women show comparable pension incomes across marital status, although divorced women have slightly lower pension incomes, while divorced men receive approximately 26 % less pension income than married men.
The dissertation illustrates that family and work life are intertwined, that they unfold gradually across the life course, and that the welfare state context shapes the interrelation of divorce and economic wellbeing: The event of divorce (and separation) not only directly impacts employment biographies of mothers but is, in a long-term perspective, related to retirement trajectories of women and men and their public pension incomes.