Personnel management in East Germany

School of Managemen

The impact of paid maternity leave on labour market outcomes

This working paper look into the effect of paid maternity leave on mothers probability of employment after birth, how this effect varies with the age of the child, and the effect on wages when the child is about four years old. A statistical matching approach is applied. The matching procedure controls for an extensive range of pre-birth job characteristics, health and human capital measures, and attitudes towards nonmaternal care. Mothers appear to delay their return to work after a birth if they are entitled to paid maternity leave, but the delay is short and does not affect wages in the long-run

Financial Incentives to Postpone Retirement and Further Effects on Employment - Evidence from a Natural Experiment

This paper examines the effect of the introduction of permanent benefit reductions for early retirees (i) on the duration until retirement entry and (ii) on the duration until exit from gainful employment. I estimate discrete time duration models using different error term specifications. Administrative data containing the full earnings history of the individuals are used. Since the reform implementing the benefit reductions was a natural experiment, a true causal effect can be identified. The permanent reduction of retirement benefit amounts causes a postponement of retirement entry by about fifteen months and a delay of employment exit by about nine months on average.retirement insurance, labor force participation, natural experiment

Disability Pensions and Labor Supply

I investigate the incentive effects of disability pensions on the labor supply decision of the elderly in Germany. In the year 2001, a reform decreased the level of benefits and tightened the criteria of eligibility. The purpose of this paper is twofold: First, I estimate transition rates into disability retirement, both prior to and after the reform in order to evaluate the effect of the reform on retirement behavior. Second, I use the exogenous variation in (a) expected benefit levels and (b) expected benefit accruals that is caused by the reform, in order to obtain reliable estimates of individuals’ responses in retirement behavior to financial incentives. While health status and expected wages turn out to be important determinants of the decision to enter disability retirement, benefits have only a small effect.disability pensions, labor force exit, Germany

The Effect of Disability Pension Incentives on Early Retirement Decisions

I investigate the incentive effects of disability pensions on the labour supply decision. The implicit tax rate on further work is included as a forward looking incentive measure in order to investigate the effect of disability benefits on disability retirement entry as a special type of early retirement. A substantial change of the disability pension legislation caused exogenous variation in disability benefits in Germany in 2001 and is used to obtain estimates of individual’s responses to financial incentives. Benefit levels appear to have no effect on the labour market behaviour. At the same time, there is a sizable and significant disincentive effect of implicit taxes on labour market income, indicating that alleviating such disincentives would likely increase labour force participation. Since the response to financial incentives occurs mainly among those in good health, such a policy might on the other hand imperil the aim of providing insurance against a health induced loss of ones working capacity.Disability pensions, labour force exit

On the derivation of power-law distributions within classical statistical mechanics far from the thermodynamic limit

We show that within classical statistical mechanics without taking the thermodynamic limit, the most general Boltzmann factor for the canonical ensemble is a q-exponential function. The only assumption here is that microcanonical distributions have to be separable from of the total system energy, which is the prerequisite for any sensible measurement. We derive that all separable distributions are parametrized by a mathematical separation constant Q which can be related to the non-extensivity q-parameter in Tsallis distributions. We further demonstrate that nature fixes the separation constant Q to 1 for large dimensionality of Gibbs Gamma-phase space. Our results will be relevant for systems with a low-dimensional Gamma-space, for example nanosystems, comprised of a small number of particles or for systems with a dimensionally collapsed phase space, which might be the case for a large class of complex systems.Comment: 8 pages, contribution to Next Sigma Phi, Crete 200