Crowded Career Ladders? Intra-firm Spillovers of Raising Retirement Age 

Abstract: 

new WP soon [Winter 2025/2026], substantially updating the previously circulated 2024 WP

Awards: 1st place: Young Economists Seminar (Croatian National Bank, 2024), 

2nd place: Young Economist of the Year in the Czech Republic (Czech Economic Society, 2024)

(for an earlier version in 2024 that also included parts of the paper "Retirement Age Reforms and Worker Substitutability: Implications for Employment of Older Workers" )

Media highlight:  Roklen 24 (in Czech)

Peer Effects in Old-Age Employment Among Women 

Abstract: 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 networks. 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. I find that women are more likely to remain employed at older ages when their peers do, with stronger effects in the regions of former 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 patterns.

CERGE-EI WP No. 800 [August 2025]; 

IAB-DP 13|2025 [October 2025] 

Media highlight: IAB (in German)

Retirement Age Reforms and Worker Substitutability: Implications for Employment of Older Workers

Abstract: This paper studies how worker substitutability and job-specific skills—shape employment responses to a rise in the early retirement age. Using a regression discontinuity design, I exploit a 1999 German reform that eliminated the option for women to retire at age 60. Before the reform, older workers could exit voluntarily, thereby imposing turnover costs on firms. Afterward, firms were better able to retain less substitutable workers for whom turnover costs are higher. At the same time, the loss of early pension eligibility reduced workers’ outside options, allowing firms to offer lower wages, often through partial retirement. 

CERGE-EI WP No. 794 [May 2025]; 

IAB-DP 14|2025 [October 2025]

Media highlight: CERGE-EI Economic Insights (Summer 2025) ; IAB 

Household Perspective of a Job Loss (with C. Biesenbeek & M. Mastrogiacomo)  

Abstract: This paper quantifies the effects of job displacement during the Great Recession on the wages and household incomes of parents with children using Dutch registry data. We then examine the adult incomes of their children and study how experiencing parental job loss in childhood affects absolute and relative income mobility in adulthood, i.e., we test whether there is a permanent downward shift in economic status vs. income convergence/divergence of children born into poorer families with their wealthier-born peers based on parental job loss status.  

WP scheduled [Spring-Summer 2026]

preliminary baseline results are censored from the abstract due to data restrictions, data coding in progress for robustness and mechanisms

Disclosure Discrimination: An Experiment Focusing on Communication in the Hiring Process (with D.Korlyakova & R.Rehák) 

Abstract: We study disclosure discrimination---biases in what applicant information is communicated within hiring teams. In an online experiment with a representative Czech sample, HR assistants selected which details from real workers’ profiles to share with managers, under randomized candidate names. Assistants disclosed less information about foreigners, reflecting lower attention to their CVs, and emphasized women’s marital status and children more often, consistent with broader gender stereotypes. Bias thus emerges not only in hiring decisions but through internal communication, highlighting the role of organizational design in fair hiring.

CERGE-EI WP No. 743 [February 2023]