Peer Effects in Old-Age Employment Among Women

Sona Badalyan

CERGE-EI Working Papers from The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague

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.

Keywords: aging; gender; peer effects; old age employment; social norms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D85 H55 J14 J16 J22 J26 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-eur, nep-lab and nep-soc
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cer:papers:wp800

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