Sample of insured persons and their insurance accounts (VKST)

Summary

The Sample of Pension Insurance Accounts deals with pension entitlements of insured people. Detailed information on times relevant to pension insurance is available in the data set. The data set contains process-produced longitudinal data, so employment histories can be analysed without facing the usual problems of longitudinal surveys in social sciences – such as panel mortality or memory errors. The data set contains more validated information on details of the employment history than respondents normally remember. The sample is very large, so that detailed analyses are possible. The panel has been built since 1983, so it contains a great deal of information on social change. Information on topics other than occupation is mostly missing. There is only some information on education and qualification, but this is incomplete because these data are reported by employers voluntarily. Information on children born is only included for women, not for men. Households and couples cannot be identified. Data in this data set are selective – periods of employment as civil servants or independent entrepreneurs are not recorded. Data for employment periods in minor jobs are only recorded if they were registered by the minor employed. There is information missing on occupation periods of people who immigrated to Germany or who moved abroad from Germany. That means that nearly all people in Germany have a pension insurance account, but many of these contain large gaps without information on the occupation. Unclear accounts are the reason for another type of missing data. Data are not easy to handle as there is a lot of information in the data set that cannot be analysed and interpreted without knowledge of the German pension law.

Type of data

Data Source
Registry

Type of Study
Survey same

Data gathering method
Registries

Access to data

Conditions of access
Datasets are made available by the Research Data Centre. • Scientific Use Files (SUF) are available only for recognized, independent, scientific institutions • Public-Use-Files (PUF) are available for teaching purposes • Remote Data Processing is available for registered data users with SPSS- and STATA-files (www.fernrechnen.de) • On-site workplaces for guest scientists (more data with less reduced characteristics than SUFs

Type of available data (e.g. anonymised microdata, aggregated tables, etc.)
anonymised microdata

Formats available
Scientific Use Files: SPSS, STATA

Coverage

Coverage Years of collection, reference years, and sample sizes
Data collection ongoing since 2002 (2003 is excluded). Year N (Scientific use file) 2002 57,832 2004 58,611 2005 59,457 2006 60,304 2007 60,821 2008 61,410 2009 61,894 2010 62,705

First year of collection
SUF available since 2002, panel base for all waves: stratified random sample from 1983 with disproportional selection probabilities

Stratification if applicable
sex, nationality, insurance branch of the current account holder, age cohort

Base used for sampling

Geographical coverage and breakdowns
Germany, no regional information

Age range
Sample: Insured persons aged 15 to 67 years, SUF: only Germans living in Germany and aged 30 to 67 years

Statistical representativeness
Population representative

Coverage of main and cross-cutting topics
Information based on pension insurance accounts about: • socio-demographic items (age, sex, children born, profession. etc.) • insurance history - times of employment, unemployment, education, military and community service, illness, child-raising periods, self-employment subject to social insurance, non-professional long-term caring (since 1995), minor employment (since 1999) • entitlements from the pension insurance (earning points)

Linkage

Standardisation

Possibility of linkage among databases
Linkage by data user not possible

Data quality

Entry errors if applicable
No information

Breaks
No information

Consistency of terminology or coding used during collection
No information

Governance

Contact information
Michael Stegmann
Forschungsdatenzentrum der Rentenversicherung (FDZ-RV)
Berner Straße 1
97084 Würzburg Germany Phone: +49 0931 6002-73519
Email: Michael.Stegmann(at)drv-bund.de
Url: http://forschung.deutsche-rentenversicherung.de/FdzPortalWeb/?ViewNavi=StartSeite

Timeliness, transparency
No survey, data set is based on process-produced data.