Time preferences vary by age. Notably, according to experimental studies, senior citizens tend to discount future payoffs more heavily than working-age individuals. Based on these findings, we hypothesize that demographic change has contributed to the cut-back in government-financed investment...

We present an Uncertainty Perception Indicator (UPI) for Germany based on the dynamic topic modelling technique RollingLDA. In contrast to conventional LDA, where all data is processed in one go, the recursive structure of RollingLDA ensures that data is made available for modeling as soon as it...

Corporate investment in Germany has been relatively weak for a prolonged period after the financial crisis. This was remarkable given that interest rates and overall economic activity, important determinants of corporate investment, developed quite favourably during that time. These developments...

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 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...

This paper analyses the effects of exchange rate uncertainty on the pricing behaviour of import firms in the euro area. Uncertainty is measured via the volatility of the structural shocks to the exchange rate in a non-linear VAR framework and is an important determinant of import prices. An...

We use recently published long-run microdata (SCF+) to investigate generational wealth dynamics in the U.S. over the last seven decades. We document that the median wealth of people born in the first half of the 20th century increased from one ten-year birth cohort to the next. For people born...

Poverty rates in Rwanda have fallen substantially in the last decades. So far, however, it is not well understood what has driven this poverty decline. Thus, in this paper, we rely on a newly available household panel dataset collected in 2010/11 and 2013/14 to investigate poverty and poverty...

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...