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...

Understanding how households form their long-term saving and investment decisions to shoulder risks not covered by social security systems has been of primary importance in all the countries which, like Germany, introduced major reforms to face the challenges of an aging population. This paper...

We study the relation between workers’ age and their productivity in work teams, based on a new and unique data set that combines data on errors occurring in the production process of a large car manufacturer with detailed information on the personal characteristics of workers re-lated to the...

The extent of the demographic change in Europe and especially Germany is dramatic and will deeply affect future labor, financial and goods markets. The expected strain on public budgets and especially social security has received prominent attention, but aging poses many other economic...

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...

Projected demographic changes in industrialized and developing countries vary in extent and timing but will reduce the share of the population in working age everywhere. Conventional wisdom suggests that this will increase capital intensity with falling rates of return to capital and increasing...