Sona Badalyan

I am an applied microeconomist. I am mainly interested in the intersection of social safety net programs with labor markets. A large strand of my research focuses on internal labor markets: retirement reforms, employment decisions, and workplace interactions. I have received 2 awards for that research: 1st place: Young Economists Seminar (Croatian National Bank, 2024), 2nd place: Young Economist of the Year in the Czech Republic (Czech Economic Society, 2024). I also work on job loss and its implications on households.

I am a PhD candidate in Economics at the CERGE-EI and a part-time research associate at the Institute for Employment Research (IAB). During my PhD years, I made research visits to the University of Chicago and the IAB. I also did a PhD internship at the Dutch National Bank.

CV: here

E-mail: sona.badalyan@cerge-ei.cz ; sona.badalyan2@iab.de

Research

Crowded Career Ladders? Intra-firm Spillovers of Raising Retirement Age [updating the draft]

Households in Crisis: From Pink Slips to Career Shifts Across Generations (with C. Biesenbeek & M. Mastrogiacomo) [data coding is in progress]

Working papers

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

[WP coming soon]

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

Abstract: This paper studies how labor demand factors—specifically 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.

[SSRN link, CERGE-EI Working Paper No. 794]

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

We study communication within hiring teams and document discrimination in how candidate information is shared. In an online experiment with a representative Czech sample acting as HR assistants and managers, we manipulate candidate names to test for gender and nationality effects. Monitoring assistants’ information disclosure, we find they share more about family and less about work for women than for men—reflecting gender stereotypes. They also disclose less about foreigners, driven by lower effort to learn about them. These results highlight how bias can emerge not just in decisions but in internal communication during hiring.

[SSRN link, CERGE-EI Working Paper No. 743]