We study the 2011 Austrian Pay Transparency Law, which requires firms above a size threshold to publish reports on the gender pay gap. Using an event-study design, we show that the policy had no discernible effects on male and female wages, and therefore no significant effects on the gender wage gap. The effects are precisely estimated and we can rule out that the policy narrowed the gender wage gap by more than half a percentage point. The policy led to an increase in the retention of workers, which points towards higher job satisfaction due to pay transparency.

We investigate the effect of social capital on health outcomes during the Covid-19 pandemic in independent analyses for Austria, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland. Exploiting detailed geographical variation within countries, we show that a one-standard-deviation increase in social capital leads to between 14% and 34% fewer Covid-19 cases per capita accumulated from mid-March until end of June 2020, as well as between 6% and 35% fewer excess deaths per capita. Our results highlight the positive health returns of strengthening social capital. 

Since the start of the CoViD-19 pandemic, a major source of concern has been its effect on mental health. Using pre-pandemic information and five customized questionnaires in the Dutch LISS panel, we investigate how mental health in the working population has evolved along with the most prominent risk factors associated with the pandemic. Overall, mental health decreased sharply with the onset of the first lockdown but recovered fairly quickly. In December 2020, levels of mental health are comparable to those in November 2019. We show that perceived risk of infection, labor market uncertainty, and emotional loneliness are all associated with worsening mental health. Both the initial drop and subsequent recovery are larger for parents of children below the age of 12. Among parents, the patterns are particularly pronounced for fathers if they shoulder the bulk of additional care. Mothers' mental health takes a particularly steep hit if they work from home and their partner is designated to take care during the additional hours.

Although one-third of workers in the USA and Germany contract supplementary private disability insurance (DI), most studies on the design of public DI systems abstract from private DI. Using unique and comprehensive contract data from a major German insurance company and representative survey data, I add novel insights on the interaction between private and public DI by estimating a rich dynamic life-cycle model with private insurance choices. I find that the welfare-improving public DI schedule is less generous in the presence of supplementary private DI. This is a consequence of the additional moral hazard private DI take-up imposes on the public system. I show that while having a private DI market is welfare-improving under the current public DI schedule in Germany, private DI markets can be welfare-reducing for more generous public DI systems as observed in other countries.

Public disability insurance (DI) programs in many countries face pressure to cut back their generosity in order to remain sustainable. In this paper, we investigate the welfare effects of giving a larger role to private insurance markets in the face of public DI cuts. Exploiting a unique reform that abolished one part of the German public DI system for younger cohorts, we find that despite significant crowding-in effects, overall private DI take-up remains modest. Moreover, private DI tends to be concentrated among high-income, high-education and low-risk individuals. We do not find any evidence of adverse selection on unpriced risk. Finally, we estimate individual insurance valuations via a revealed preferences approach, a key input for assessing the welfare consequences of (partly) privatizing DI. Taken at face value, the low observed willingness to pay of many individuals implies that a private DI market with choice is welfare-improving compared to a full public DI mandate. However, we show that distributional concerns as well as individual risk misperceptions can provide grounds for justifying a public mandate. 

We study the 2018 German Pay Transparency policy which allows employees in establishments with more than 200 workers, to ask their employers for information about the average earnings of their opposite-gender coworkers who do `equal work'.  Using an event study design and matched employer-employee data, we show that the policy had no discernible effects on male and female wages, thus leaving the gender wage gap unchanged. Using survey evidence, we further show that only 1\% of men and 2.7\% of women had asked their employers for information in the previous year. We find that workers were not willing to ask for information either because they believed that there was no significant gender pay gap at their workplaces or because they were apprehensive of hurting their `image'. We argue that transparency, as enacted in Germany, placed an additional barrier to information access by requiring workers to seek out information instead of mandating firms to disclose data. 

(An older version circulated under the title: Information, Workplace Norms and Pay Differences - Lessons from Germany )