This paper explores how extended unemployment insurance (UI) benefits targeted to older workers affect early retirement and social welfare. The trade-off of optimal UI between consumption smoothing and moral hazard requires accounting for the entire early retirement system, which often includes...

Public interest in the gender pay gap has risen significantly over the past years in Germany, but the size of the gender pay gap has barely changed. A comparison across European countries shows that a lower female labor force participation rate is associated with a smaller gender pay gap. The...

We use firm closure data from social security records for Austria 1978-1998 to investigate the effect of age on employment prospects. We rely on exact matching to compare workers displaced due to firm closure with similar non-displaced workers. We then use a difference-in- difference strategy to...

We investigate whether the costs of job displacement differ between blue collar and white collar workers. In the short run earnings and employment losses are substantial for both groups but stronger for white collar workes. In the long run, there are only weak effects for blue collar workers but...

We study whether employment prospects of old and young workers differ after a plant closure. Using Austrian administrative data, we show that old and young workers face similar displacement costs in terms of employment in the long-run, but old workers lose considerably more initially and gain...

Women remain significantly underrepresented in the top decision-making bodies in the private sector. Over the past few years, increasingly more European countries have introduced statutory gender quotas to combat this underrepresentation. Other European countries have instead relied on voluntary...

Work and family life arrangements differed greatly between the east and west before German reunification in 1990. Since reunification, however, the employment rates of mothers with children requiring childcare have converged. This trend is accompanied by a growing approval of maternal...

Two traditional options for reforming Ehegattensplitting, the joint taxation of married couples with full income splitting, are de facto income splitting (Realsplitting) or individual taxation with a transferable personal allowance. However, these proposals do not significantly reduce the...

While the gender pay gap between men and women in Germany remains at 18 percent, this figure is not the same for all employees. There are, for example, major differences by age. Beginning at age 30, the gender pay gap increases sharply and remains constantly high at 20 percent until retirement....