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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, ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

Wealth and Its Distribution in Germany, 1895-2021

German history over the past 125 years has been turbulent. Marked by two world wars, revolutions and major regime changes, as well as a hyperinflation and three currency reforms, expropriations and territorial divisions, it comprises extreme shocks to study the role of historical events, taxation, asset price changes, portfolio heterogeneity in affecting the wealth distribution in the long run. Combining ...

The Gender Pension Gap Grows the More Children a Woman Has

The gender pension gap, the difference in pension entitlements between men and women, is 32 percent for 60-yearolds according to data from the German Pension Insurance (Deutsche Rentenversicherung). In addition, there is a considerable motherhood pension gap: Statutory pension entitlements for mothers and childless women differ greatly. Pension-related childcare credits, which were introduced in 1986 ...

The Effect of Pension Wealth on Employment

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, ...

Relieve through midijob reform

The effect of pension reforms on old age poverty

This project analyses various reform and labour market scenarios with regard to their impact on old-age poverty in the period up to 2045. These are changes to the lower limit for the level of protection in the GRV (holding lines), the pension adjustment rule, a higher retirement age, a generous exemption scheme for pension income from the GRV for basic security, and increased gainful employment at...