We elicit preferences for retirement timing in a laboratory experiment. Subjects make retirement choices under different payoff schemes that introduce variation in financial incentives. Testing ceteris paribus conditions of the financial incentive alone shows a considerable delay of retirement...

I estimate the effect of retirement on mortality, exploiting two discontinuities at age-based eligibility thresholds for pension claiming in Germany. The analysis is based on unique social security records that document the age at death for the universe of participants in the German public...

We study the labor supply effects and welfare implications of introducing a universal means-tested old-age assistance program in times of very limited social protection. We take advantage of a unique historical reform: The Old-Age Pension Act (OPA) of 1908, which, for the first time, provided...

I study the impact of old-age assistance on mortality using the introduction of public pensions in the UK in 1909 as a quasi-natural experiment. Exploiting the newly created pension eligibility age through a difference-in-difference as well as an event-time design, I show that elderly mortality...

Rising public pension generosity has frequently been cited as one reason for the (persistently) declining fertility rates in many advanced economies. Despite the theoretical appeal, empirical evidence on the pension-fertility nexus is limited. To fill this gap, I study country-level fertility...

The behavioural response with respect to actuarial adjustments in the German public pension system is analysed. The introduction of actuarial adjustments serves as a source of exogenous variation to estimate discrete time transition rates into retirement. The analysis is conducted on...

The strong association between income and mortality raises the question whether more generous social security systems could improve poor people’s health outcomes. Thus, in this paper, I analyze whether a major social security innovation, the introduction of social pensions targeted at poor...

Many studies have shown that childhood circumstances can have long term consequences that persist until old age. To better understand the transmission of early life circumstances, this paper analyses the effects of health and financial situation during childhood on quality of life after...

In this paper, I evaluate potential side effects of the educational expansion in Germany on the learning outcomes of today's students. The educational expansion was a demand shock in the labor market of teachers, which could have thus encouraged individuals with different teaching abilities to...

The effect of marijuana liberalization on crime is object of a large interest by social scientists and policy-makers. However, due to the scarcity of relevant data, the displacement effect of liberalization on the supply of illegal drugs remained substantially unexplored. This paper exploits the...