This paper studies a program that extends the maximum duration of unemployment benefits from 30 weeks to 209 weeks. Interestingly, this program is targeted to individuals aged 50 years or older, living in certain eligible regions in Austria. In the evaluation, I use sharp discontinuities in...

This study examines an increase in the early retirement age from 60 to 63 for the group of older unemployed men in Germany. As consequence of this policy reform, the time to retirement is increased from the perspective of recently unemployed individuals and therefore serves as a source of...

This paper presents new evidence on the effects of retirement benefits on labor force participation decisions. The analysis is based on a mandated rule for employer-provided retirement benefits in Austria that creates discontinuities in the incentives for workers to delay retirement. We present...

This paper studies the role of job search assistance programs in optimal welfare-to-work programs. The analysis is based on a framework, that allows for endogenous choice of benefit types and levels, wage taxes or subsidies, and activation measures such as monitoring and job search assistance...

Recent literature on long-term care looks at the substitutability of informal and professional home-based care arrangements. Other factors that influence the utilization of informal care instead of formal care have been ignored in conditional analyses so far. However, regressors that represent...

We study the effect of unemployment on cognitive abilities among individuals aged between 50 and 65 in Europe. To this end, we exploit plant closures and use flexible event-study estimations together with an experimentally elicited measure of fluid intelligence, namely word recall. We find that,...