Empirical Essays in the Economics of Ageing and the Economics of Innovation

This dissertation consists of five distinct empirical papers covering two large areas of research that are rather independent from each other: the economics of ageing and the economics of innovation. The first three chapters cover the impact of intergeneration interaction on the parents of adult children. Chapter 1 explores the effects of grandchild care on grandparent labour supply. Chapter 2 on the other hand investigates the impact of grandchild care on grandparent health. Chapter 3 analyses the effect of a divorce of an adult child on the parent. The final two chapters take another direction. They evaluate the effects of research and development (R&D) promoting subsidy schemes. Chapter 4 looks at two regionally focused subsidies in the German biotech sector, while Chapter 5 investigates the effect of R&D subsidies from multiple national and international sources on small and medium sized enterprises (SME) in Thuringia.