We investigate the responsiveness of individual retirement decisions to changes in financial incentives. The causal effect is identified based on the natural experiment generated by an institutional reform. The results of a binary retirement model are robust to alternative model specifications,...

Over the last decades the German education system underwent numerous reforms in order to improve "equality of opportunity", i.e. to guarantee all pupils equal access to higher education. At the same time internationally comparative evidence yields that Germany features particularly low...

We study the labor supply effects of a change in child-subsidy policy designed to both increase fertility and shorten birth-related employment interruptions. The reform yields most of the intended effects.

Over the last decades the German education system underwent numerous reforms in order to improve "equality of opportunity", i.e. to guarantee all pupils equal access to higher education. At the same time internationally comparative evidence yields that Germany features particularly low...

We extend the literature on transition economies' wage structures by investigating the returns to tenure and experience. This study applies recent panel data and estimation approaches that control for hitherto neglected biases. We compare the life cycle structure in East and West German wages...

Over the last decades the German education system underwent numerous reforms in order to improve “equality of opportunity”, i.e. to guarantee all pupils independent of parental background equal access to higher education. At the same time internationally comparative evidence yields that...

This paper contributes in three dimensions to the literature on health care demand. First, it features the first application of a bivariate random effects estimator in a count data setting, to permit the efficient estimation of this type of model with panel data. Second, it provides an...

We extend the literature on transition economies' wage structures by investigating the returns to tenure and experience. This study applies recent panel data and estimation approaches that control for hitherto neglected biases. We compare the life cycle structure in East and West German wages...

Employment protection systems are widely believed to generate distortions in firms' hiring and firing decisions. However, much less is known about the impact of these regulations on workers' behavior. In this paper we provide evidence on the latter question using data from a large Italian bank....