"Firm Responses to Raising Women's Retirement Age" [Job Market Paper, Latest working version]
Abstract: Coworkers’ careers are interdependent. This study examines the impact of a reform that increased the retirement age for women on the career opportunities of younger workers. Using administrative social security data from Germany, I find that the reform-induced extension of older women’s careers reduces promotion opportunities and external hiring chances for younger coworkers. These crowding-out effects emerge during the years when the first affected cohorts of women remain in the labor force between the pre-reform and post-reform pensionable ages, with no large evidence of adjustments beforehand. The crowd-out effects are particularly pronounced for middle-aged female coworkers and external hires. The stronger impact on women is primarily driven by industrial and occupational segregation by gender in Germany. At the same time, the larger effect on middle-aged workers arises from their greater substitutability with older workers due to their proximity on career ladders, compared to the younger workers. Finally, the overall effects on the retention of older women exhibit substantial heterogeneity by the availability of internal and external substitutes, underscoring the role of labor market frictions in shaping the broader consequences of retirement reforms.
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)
Grants: GAUK project No. 333221 (Principal Investigator)
Presented at: EWMES; EALE; IZA Summer School; ESPE; Dutch National Bank; Young Economists Seminar (Croatian National Bank); SITES; AIEL; IAB DiskAB and REGIO Department Flash Talks; Student Workshop at Harris School of Public Policy at UChicago; BSE Summer School; Czech Economic Society Biennial Conference; Armenian Economic Association Annual Meeting; CERGE-EI Brown Bag, DPW, DW, Applied Microeconometrics Reading Group
Scheduled presentations: SOLE (World SOLE-EALE-AASLE conference); International Conference on Pension, Insurance and Savings; RFBerlin Workshop on the Economics of Aging; IZA/Leiden/OECD Workshop on Recent Advances in Labor Economics Using Linked Employer-Employee Data