Sona

3/3. Women are more likely to remain employed at older ages when their peers do, with stronger effects in West Germany, with its traditional gender norms. Gender-neutral pension reforms thus amplify their impact through peer influence, fostering regional convergence in late-career employment.

2/3. The reform raised women’s earliest claiming age from 60 to 63 for cohorts born in 1952 onward. Using the universe of workgroups from social security records, I compare women whose peers were just above or below the reform cutoff.

1/3.🧵
New working paper!
"Peer Effects in Old-Age Employment Among Women"
WP: cerge-ei.cz/pdf/wp/Wp800...
This paper exploits a unique norm-shifting setting—a German pension reform that equalized retirement ages across genders—to examine how old-age employment propagates through workplace network

Read: cerge-ei.cz/pdf/wp/Wp800... Feedback welcome!

I find that women are more likely to remain employed at older ages when their peers do, with stronger effects in West Germany, with its traditional gender norms. Gender-neutral pension reforms amplify their impact through peer influence, fostering regional convergence in late-career employment.

The reform raised women’s earliest claiming age from 60 to 63 for cohorts born in 1952 onward. Using the universe of workgroups from social security records, I compare women whose peers were just above or below the reform cutoff.

7/7 But academia should be a place where hard work and success are acknowledged without qualification.

Recognizing and addressing these subtle forms of discouragement is essential if we want healthier and more supportive academic communities.

6/7 I believe this dynamic exists partly because academia attracts many people who feel the need to constantly prove themselves — and the easiest way becomes undermining others’ achievements.

5/7 These remarks may sound casual, but they slowly erode confidence and diminish recognition. They’re not just jokes — they’re microaggressions and psychological undermining leading to toxicity at universities or institutions.

4/7 Even when a paper is finally accepted to a top conference after years of revisions and rejections, comments like:
“Acceptance is random anyway — it depends on data or co-authors or affiliation,” are common.

3/7 When a course is passed, an older cohort may say:
“If you took it in our year, it was impossible.”

When the WP is finalized, the response may be “you wrote it fast because you did not do anything else, unlike me”

2/7 When someone wins a competition, the response might be:
“I didn’t even apply,” or “This year it was easy.”

Incredible feeling to finally see it published 🤩

What are the macro effects of making UI more generous?

In this paper we seek to answer this contentious question 📝

We find increases in aggregate unemployment, driven by both longer UI durations & increased inflows 💡

Rentenverteilung in Deutschland: Wo Männer doppelt so viel Rente bekommen wie Frauen Männer erhalten im Schnitt 52 Prozent mehr Rente. Unsere exklusiven Daten zeigen, in welchen Landkreisen die Rentenlücke noch größer ist. Vergleichen Sie Ihre Region.

Männer erhalten im Schnitt 52 Prozent mehr Rente. Unsere exklusiven Daten zeigen, in welchen Landkreisen die Rentenlücke noch größer ist. Vergleichen Sie Ihre Region.

One day left to apply for the "Workshop on Urban Labor Markets and Local Income Inequality", organized by the Regio department at IAB. Deadline: June 30 (tomorrow!) Great committee, keynote, and networking opportunity.
iab.de/en/iab-veran...

@rfberlin.bsky.social Meet me on June 5, at “RFBerlin Workshop on the Economics of Aging”!
I am presenting my paper about firm perspective on raising women’s retirement age in Germany, worker substitutability, and direct and spillover effects of raised retirement ages on the workforce.

Feedback welcome!
#LaborEconomics #Retirement #Aging #HumanCapital #WorkerSubstitutability #InternalLaborMarkets

The reform helped firms retain less substitutable workers, lowering both turnover costs and wages. This sheds light on how labor demand frictions shape retirement and firm behavior.

Firms retained older workers who were harder to replace—both internally (by coworkers) and externally (from the local labor market), those with job-specific skills. The reform reduced outside options in the form of pensions, allowing firms to offer lower wages, often via partial retirement contracts

New working paper "Retirement Age Reforms and Worker
Substitutability: Implications
for Employment of Older Workers"! Paper link: cerge-ei.cz/pdf/wp/Wp794...
How do firms respond when early retirement options vanish? I study a German reform that raised the early retirement age for women.

I will show how raising the early retirement age of women helped firms retain less substitutable workers (for whom the turnover costs would be high if they left for retirement earlier), and its implications for the career opportunities of younger workers.
international-pension-workshop.com/wp/

I am presenting my paper "Firm Responses to Raising Women's Retirement Age" at the 21st International Conference on Pensions, Insurance and Savings on Thursday, May 29, 2025- stop by if you are around Lisbon!

I will show how raising the early retirement age of women helped firms retain less substitutable workers (for whom the turnover costs would be high otherwise), and what such retention of difficult-to-replace workers implies for the career opportunities of younger coworkers and external hires.

I am presenting my paper "Firm Responses to Raising Women's Retirement Age" at the "IZA/Leiden University/OECD Workshop: Recent Advances in Labor Economics Using Linked Employer-Employee Data" this Friday, May 23, 2025.
conference.iza.org/IZA_OECD_202...
#izaOECD @iza.org

Intl. PhD students in the EU often need separate visas for UK/US/Canada—unlike their EU peers. Even early visa applications can fail due to 300+ day wait times.

We need structural fixes. Talent is everywhere—mobility should be too.

#AcademicMobility #VisaInequality #PhDLife #ECRvoices

Please apply!

EU (Ursula von der Leyen) signed a shameful agreement with another dictator state -Azerbaijan- to deliver gas to the EU, right after Azerbaijan made an ethnic cleansing of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. Humanity should not depend on financial benefits/resources! Humans are humans- European or not!

this is terrible, hard to read. I hope that some sister institutions will step up to hire the excellent crew I saw at Iza

The Call for Papers for the ArmEA's Annual Meetings 2025 in Yerevan on June 30-July 2 has been released!
Deadline: Feb 15!

aea.am/annual-meeti...

I am presenting my JMP at the European Winter Meeting of Econometric Society on Tuesday Dec 17, at 13:30! The paper examines how raising women’s retirement age impacts younger coworkers' career opportunities in firms and confirms that coworkers’ careers are interdependent. #EWMES