Project Details
Projekt
Increasing the labour supply of older workers
Subject Area
Economic Policy, Applied Economics
Term
since 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 518302089
This project studies the employment behaviour of older workers close to retirement. The literature has shown that pension reforms raising the statutory retirement age alone are not sufficient to increase employment. This project provides new causal evidence on three channels that might explain the limited success of pension reforms: 1) program substitution between pension and unemployment insurance; 2) lack of job-related training and health investments that could enable individuals to work longer; and 3) constraints for formal employment generated by the provision of informal long-term care for relatives or friends with health limitations. The analyses exploit exogenous variation in pension rules, the unemployment system, and the supply of formal migrant care workers. On the data side, the project uses administrative data from Germany and Poland, household survey data, and data collected in a vignette study of human resource managers. Moreover, the project leverages a structural life cycle model to evaluate employment, distributional, and welfare effects of counterfactual policies combining pension reforms and educational policies.
DFG Programme
Research Units
Co-Investigators
Dr. Johannes Geyer; Dr. Robin Jessen
