Stock market participation jumped upwards in Germany in the year 2020 by about 25%. A major cause for this was the enforced use of remote work. We show this by repeating a benchmark study with demanding data requests and adding remote work to the explanatory variables. Moreover, we implement an instrumental variables estimation based on commuting distance and work-from- home capacity. The...
Two significant drivers of a person's financial situation in old age are pension income and costs for long-term care dependence. Both are unknown when the person makes her most important financial decisions, which makes it particularly interesting to understand her beliefs about them and how they influence her choices. In a representative survey, we elicit detailed expectations about individuals...
Women continue to be underrepresented in leadership positions in the corporate sector such as on company boards. One of the reasons for this underrepresentation are gender stereotypes on the skill distribution, social and occupational roles, personality traits, and how they affect labor market decision making. Media plays an important role in transporting gender stereotypes. In this paper we...
In the recent economic crises, Germany has made use of job retention schemes and in particular short-time work benefits ('Kurzarbeit') to tackle shocks in labor demand. Under these schemes, workers have not been laid off and received unemployment benefits, but reduced their working hours (or stopped working) for a limited amount of time while receiving short-time leave benefits. While the effect...
We study the incentive and labor market effects of disability benefit programs using unique policy variation in Germany. In 2014, disability benefits of new recipients were increased considerably while eligibility criteria were not changed. We exploit this quasi-experimental policy variation to test the implications at two different margins. First, we analyze to what extent an increase in the...
Pension funds carry implications on citizens wellbeing in their retirement years and countries’ growths, rendering changes to them following natural disasters of great importance. Using administrative data that comprises a 10 percent random sample of the Australian population and a natural experimental design, we investigate the effects of natural disasters on retirement savings in the aftermath...
-- joint with Panu Poutvaara and Max Steinhardt This study analyzes the determinants of bitterness, which describes a feeling of not having achieved what one deserves compared to others. First, we perform pooled OLS and fixed effects regressions, showing that bitterness is associated with various economic and non-economic factors, whereby the effect of unemployment stands out. Therefore, in the...