Welfare state interventions shape our life courses in almost all of their multiply linked domains. In this introduction, we sketch how cross-nationally comparative retrospective data can be fruitfully employed to better understand these links and the long-run effects of the welfare state at the...

About 20% of German workers retire on disability pensions. Disability pensions provide fairly generous benefits for those who are not already age-eligible for an old-age pension and who are deemed unable to work for health reasons. In this paper, we use two sets of individual survey data to...