Early retirement options are usually targeted at employees at risk of not reaching their regular retirement age in employment. An important at‐risk group comprises employees who have worked in demanding jobs for many years. This group may be particularly negatively affected by the abolition of...

We evaluate the labor market and distributional effects of an increase in the early retirement age (ERA) from 60 to 63 for women. We use a regression discontinuity design which exploits the immediate increase in the ERA between women born in 1951 and 1952. The analysis is based on the German...

This paper shows that increasing the normal retirement age and introducing pension deductions for retirement before normal retirement age in Germany did not prolong employment of older men. The reason for this surprising result is that employers encouraged their employees to use the bridge...

Leveraging two cohort-specific pension reforms, this paper estimates the forwardlooking effects of an exogenous increase in the working horizon on (un)employment behaviour for individuals with a long remaining statutory working life. Using differencein-differences and regression discontinuity...

The assumption that remittances are a substitute for credit has been an implicit or explicit theoretical foundation of many empirical studies on remittances. This paper directly tests this assumption by comparing the response to health-related shocks among national and transnational households...

Every year 400,000 entrepreneurs fail and 60,000 file for personal bankruptcy. The option to declare bankruptcy provides entrepreneurs with insurance against the financial consequences of business failures. However, it comes at the cost of worsened credit market conditions. In this paper, we...

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we present an up-to-date assessment of the differences across euro area countries in the distributions of various measures of debt conditional on household characteristics. We consider three different outcomes: the probability of holding debt, the amount...

While recent literature has pointed out that migrants ́remittances have a positive impact on savings with financial institutions, findings with respect to access to and the use of loans have been ambiguous. This paper investigates whether the reception of remittances facilitates taking up loans...