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 co-evolution of mental health with the most prominent risk factors associated with the COVID-19 pandemic for the Dutch working population. We exploit data from the Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences panel from before the pandemic and five questionnaires in its first year. We find mental health decreased sharply with the onset of the first lockdown but recovered quickly, reaching levels comparable to those a year earlier. Labor market uncertainty, perceived infection risk, and loneliness are all associated with worsening mental health. Moreover, parents of children younger than 12 experience a significant drop in mental health.

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. 

I study the interaction between private and public disability insurance (DI). Using comprehensive contract data from a major German insurer combined with representative administrative and survey data, I estimate a dynamic life-cycle model of insurance, savings, and labor supply choices. I find that private DI imposes significant fiscal costs on public DI by increasing public DI claims. As public DI becomes more generous, private DI reduces welfare gains and eventually reduces welfare. Conversely, private DI can offset welfare losses from public cuts, allowing for welfare-enhancing and cost-reducing reforms.

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 )