The financing problems beleaguering the public pension system have again shifted the spotlight onto the retirement age. This paper examines the impact of various reform options on the actual retirement choices of older workers. The paper focuses in particular on the long-term implications of the...

Germany is an interesting country to study saving among older households since nearly everyone - whether in the middle income bracket or richer - saves substantial amounts in old age. Only households in the lowest quarter of the income distribution spend more between the ages of 60 and 75 than...

This paper provides quasi-experimental estimates of the causal effect of long-term unemployment on wages. Using standard job search theory, the paper derives and tests conditions on reemployment wages under which Unemployment Insurance (UI) extensions can be used as instrumental variables (IV)...

One goal of extending the duration of unemployment insurance (UI) in recessions is to increase UI coverage in the face of longer unemployment spells. Although it is a common concern that such extensions may themselves raise nonemployment durations, it is not known how recessions would affect the...

All across Europe, old age labor force participation has declined dramatically during the last decades. This secular trend coincides with population aging. The European social security systems therefore face a double threat: retirees receive pensions for a longer time while there are less...

This paper describes the German public old age social security program (,Gesetzliche Rentenversicherung') and its incentive effects on retirement decisions. The paper presents the key features of the system and expresses retirement incentives in the form of accrual rates of social security...

This paper reports on a set of international comparisons of how the German and the U.S. economies are affected by population aging. The paper's main focus is on the influence of institutional arrangements such as government regulations and subsidies on retirement, savings and housing choices in...

Existing research has shown that job displacement leads to large and persistent earnings losses for men, but evidence for women is scarce. Using administrative data from Germany, we apply an event study design in combination with propensity score matching and a reweighting technique to directly...

The job finding rate of Unemployment Insurance (UI) recipients declines in the initial months of unemployment and then exhibits a spike at the benefit exhaustion point. A range of theoretical explanations have been proposed, but those are hard to disentangle using data on job finding alone. To...

The nature of the relationship between employers and employees has been changing over the last decades, with firms increasingly relying on contractors, temp agencies and franchises rather than hiring employees directly. We investigate the impact of this transformation on the wage structure by...