Working life and human capital investment: Causal evidence from a pension reform

Elisabeth Fürstenau, Niklas Gohl, Peter Haan and Felix Weinhardt

Labour Economics, 2023, vol. 84, issue C

Abstract: In this paper, we analyze if an increase in the working life leads to more human capital investment via on-the-job training. We obtain RDD-estimates from a sharp date-of-birth cut-off, generated by a pension reform that increased the Early Retirement Age (ERA) by three years for many women in Germany. In our preferred specification, we find that this reform causally increased on-the-job training by 4.4 percentage points – a relative increase of 28.8 percent. We explore heterogeneity and additional outcomes and show that this effect is driven by the behavior of women with high initial levels of education. Our results speak to human capital models as well as policies towards extending or shortening working life.

Keywords: Human capital; Retirement policies; RDD (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H21 J24 J26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092753712300101X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:labeco:v:84:y:2023:i:c:s092753712300101x

DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2023.102426

Access Statistics for this article

Labour Economics is currently edited by A. Ichino

More articles in Labour Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().