This dissertation studies the relationship of informal elder care and the pension system. The thesis consists of four chapters that apply several micro-econometric methods to survey data sets. The first three chapters use quasi-experimental settings to access important margins in the relationship between informal care giving and retirement and labor market behavior. The fourth chapter builds and estimates ...
This paper examines how households adjust their savings and consumption expenditure in response to an anticipated increase in the early retirement age (ERA). We examine the 1999 pension reform in Germany, which increased the ERA for women born after 1951 by at least three years. First, we present suggestive evidence that women update their retirement planning in response to the reform. Using the German ...
In this paper we estimate the effect of unemployment on informal care provision. For the identification we use plant closures as a source of exogenous variation and combine difference-in-differences with matching based on entropy balancing. The analysis is based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). We find that there is a time conflict between employment and informal care provision. ...
This paper analyzes the impact of women's retirement on their informal care provision. Using SOEP data, we address fundamental endogeneity problems by exploiting variation in the German pension system in two complementary ways. We find a significant effect of retirement on informal care provision, when using early retirement age thresholds as instruments. Heterogeneity analyses confirm the underlying ...
Facing a reduction in pension generosity, individuals can compensate the loss by working longer or saving more. This paper shows that the impact of changes in pension generosity on saving crucially depends on the possibility of prolonging future employment. Exploiting across cohort variation in expected pension wealth induced by a 3-year lift in early retirement age for women born after 1951 in Germany, ...