Topic Retirement and Pension Provision

A new occupational disability insurance in the statutory pension insurance scheme

A large group of people is unable to keep up with the increasing retirement age and remain in the workforce until retirement for health reasons. The disability pension that exists today is only suitable to a limited extent to protect this group. The decisive factor for the reduced earning capacity is not the last activity performed, but all activities "under the usual conditions of the general...

Career Decisions over the Life-cycle: The Impact of Social Insurance Policies

Work-limiting disabilities pose a significant risk to the earnings potential and welfare of older workers. While coverage of public disability insurance (DI) systems is almost universal, the risk of becoming dependent on DI varies across occupations. In this paper, I study the value of public DI across different occupations using data from administrative social security records in Germany. I...

Long-Run Consequences of Informal Elderly Care and Implications of Public Long-Term Care Insurance

We estimate a dynamic structural model of labor supply, retirement, and informal caregiving to study short and long-term costs of informal caregiving in Germany. Incorporating labor market frictions and the German tax and benefit system, we find that in the absence of Germany’s public long-term insurance scheme, informal elderly care has adverse and persistent effects on labor market outcomes and, ...

Bad Luck or Bad Decisions? Macroeconomic Implications of Persistent Heterogeneity in Cognitive Skills and Overconfidence

Business cycle models often abstract from persistent household heterogeneity, despite its potentially significant implications for macroeconomic fluctuations and policy. We show empirically that the likelihood of being persistently financially constrained decreases with cognitive skills and increases with overconfidence thereon. Guided by this and other micro evidence, we add persistent heterogeneity ...

Labour Supply and Survivor Insurance in the Netherlands

This paper investigates the effects of survivor benefits (SB) on the labour supply of widows. Using richadministrative data on the Dutch population and a reform that considerably restricted eligibility to SB, weidentify the causal effect of SB on labour supply. Using a regression discontinuity design strategy based onthe cohort-based implementation of the reform, we show that labour income after spousal ...

The Heterogeneous Effects of Social Assistance and Unemployment Insurance: Evidence from a Life-Cycle Model of Family Labor Supply and Savings

We empirically analyze the heterogeneous welfare effects of unemployment insurance and social assistance. We estimate a structural life-cycle model of singles' and married couples' labor supply and savings decisions. The model includes heterogeneity by age, education, wealth, sex and household composition. In aggregate, social assistance dominates unemployment insurance; however, the opposite holds ...

Income Effects of Disability Benefits

We provide novel evidence about the incentive and welfare effects of an increase in the generosity of disability benefits. Importantly, a unique policy variation in Germany allows us to isolate the income effect of a change in benefit generosity. We leverage this quasi-experimental policy variation using an RD design to estimate the effect of increasing disability benefits on employment, earnings, ...

Financial Incentives and Labor Force Participation of Older Workers: Evidence from France

This paper estimates the impact of financial incentives on retirement decision in France for cohorts of men retiring between 1994 to 2012. During these two decades, a number of pension reforms took place, all aiming to achieve financial balance in the context of increasing life expectancy. These reforms strengthened incentives to retire later, either by ofoffering increased pension benefit for later ...

Certification against Greenwashing in Nascent Bond Markets: Lessons from African ESG Bonds

Africa is one of the most vulnerable continents to climate change. Climate and sustainability-linked bonds can provide funding to African governments and corporations for projects that help to mitigate climate change, combat biodiversity loss, and foster sustainable development. However, less than 0.3% of the global environmental, social, governance (ESG) bond issuance volume is devoted to projects ...

How to increase employment of the elderly