This dissertation consists of five independent chapters contributing to the field of applied economics. The first three chapters analyze workers' perceptions of the wage penalty associated with working part-time, further evaluating the labor supply implications of biased beliefs. Chapter 4 quantifies the effects of raising the normal retirement age on the career trajectories of middle-aged workers ...
This study provides novel evidence about the pension wealth elasticity of employment. For the identification we exploit reform-induced variation of pension wealth that is related to the number of children but which does not affect the implicit tax rate of employment. We use a difference-in-differences estimator based on administrative data from the German pension insurance and find that, on average, ...
To determine how wives’ and husbands’ retirement options affect their spouses’ (and their own) labour supply decisions, we exploit (early) retirement cutoffs by way of a regression discontinuity design. Several German pension reforms since the early 1990s have gradually raised women’s retirement age from 60 to 65, but also increased ages for several early retirement pathways affecting both sexes. We ...
Ein Unfall, eine chronische Erkrankung oder auch eine angeborene Behinderung sind häufige Ursachen für den Verlust der Erwerbsfähigkeit. Der Wegfall des Erwerbseinkommens wird zwar durch die Erwerbsminderungsrente in der gesetzlichen Rentenversicherung versichert. Diese Rente ist aber so niedrig, dass Erwerbsgeminderte einem sehr hohen Armutsrisiko ausgesetzt sind und überdurchschnittlich häufig Leistungen ...
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 ...
The German Federal Government has expanded subsidies for employees with low gross wages (midijob employees) as of January 1, 2023, and raised the upper earnings limit to 2,000 euros. As a result, around 6.2 million midijob employees will benefit from paying reduced social security contributions while still receiving their full pension entitlements, made possible by a redistribution within the social ...
This paper shows that labor demand plays an important role in the labor market reactions to a pension reform in Germany. Employers with a high share of older worker inflow compared with their younger worker inflow, employers in sectors with few investments in research and development, and employers in sectors with a high share of collective bargaining agreements allow their employees to stay employed ...
The aim of the project SOEP-RV is to link data from participants in the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) survey to their individual Deutsche Rentenversicherung (German Pension Insurance) records. For all SOEP respondents who give explicit consent to record linkage, SOEP-RV creates a linked dataset that combines the comprehensive multi-topic SOEP data with detailed cross-sectional and longitudinal ...