Topic Retirement and Pension Provision

20 Years of the Riester Pension - Personal Retirement Provision Requires Reform

Introduced 20 years ago as a part of the 2001 pension reform, the Riester pension is meant to function as an essential component of the German pension system with the aim of compensating for decreasing public pensions. However, data collected by the SOEP show that this objective has not yet been achieved. For ten years, use of the Riester pension plan has been stagnating at around 25 percent of the ...

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The Effects of an Increase in the Retirement Age on Health: Evidence from Administrative Data

This study analyzes the causal effect of an increase in the retirement age on health. We exploit a sizable cohort-specific pension reform for women using two complementary empirical approaches - a Regression Discontinuity Design and a Difference-in- Differences approach. The analysis is based on official records covering all individuals insured by the public health system in Germany and including all ...

Early Retirement of Employees in Demanding Jobs: Evidence from a German Pension Reform

Early retirement options are usually targeted at employees at risk of not reaching their regular retirement age in employment. An important at-risk group comprises employees who have worked in demanding jobs for many years. This group may be particularly negatively affected by the abolition of early retirement options. To measure differences in labor market reactions of employees in low- and high-demand ...

Closing Routes to Retirement for Women: How Do They Respond?

We study the employment effects of a large increase in the early retirement age (ERA) of women. Raising the ERA has the potential to extend contribution periods and to reduce the number of pensioners at the same time. However, workers may not be able to work longer or may choose other social support programs as exit routes from employment. Results suggest that the reform increases employment, unemployment ...

Employment Responses to Income Effect: Evidence from Pension Reform

For the design of the pension system, it is crucial to disentangle the employment responses related to the substitution effect and the income effect. In this paper, we provide causal evidence regarding the importance of the income effect, which is generally assumed to be small or non-existent. We exploit a pension reform in Germany that raised pension bene- fits related to children. For the identification, ...

Equilibrium Effects of Tax Exemptions for Low Pay

Across the world, tax exemptions for jobs with low earnings intend to incite non-participating workers to rejoin the labor market. However, such tax exemptions may also have negative equilibrium effects. The German minijob tax exemption offers a convenient case to identify equilibrium effects as it applies to some but not to other low-wage jobs. We build and estimate a structural job search model with ...

Early retirement of employees in demanding jobs: evidence from a German pension reform

Workers in demanding jobs may be particularly negatively affected by an increasing statutory retirement age. We exploit a pension reform that raised the early retirement age of women from 60 to 63 years in Germany. Based on a large administrative social security data set we exploit the quasi-natural experiment using a regression-discontinuity approach. We find the same relative employment...

The Effect of Air Quality Alerts on School Absenteeism - Evidence from New York City

This study examines the relationship between air quality alerts and school absenteeism in New York City. Examining the effects of the alerts in school attendance is relevant because it helps us understand parents' avoidance behavior in situations of exacerbated exposure to air contaminants. Causality arises by exploiting the deterministic nature of the alerts with regression discontinuity...

The Effect of Retirement on Health - Evidence from Administrative Data

We combine unique data that include all practitioner health diagnoses based on the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) collected from all publicly insured individuals in Germany with a sizable cohort specific pension reform to study the causal effect of an increase in the retirement age on health. For the analysis, we use a cohort specific regression discontinuity design. The...