An American Grant to Giulia Giupponi

Giulia Giupponi, Assistant Professor at Bocconi Department of Social and Political Sciences, has been awarded a $45,000 Steven H. Sandell Grant from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College to develop her project "The Effect of Pension Wealth on Female Labor Supply before Retirement: Evidence from Germany".

"The project exploits a German pension reform that changed the generosity of pension contributions credited to parents – mostly mothers – for the time spent raising their children," Professor Giupponi explains. From July 2014, parents of children born before January 1, 1992 had their pension benefits increased by €336 per year per child, while the pension contributions of parents of children born on or after January 1, 1992 was left unchanged.

The reform creates a permanent increase in the present discounted value of pension wealth that can be estimated somewhere in between €3,000 and €4,800 per child, which is large compared to similar policy experiments in the literature. By comparing the labor supply before retirement of women who had children immediately before and immediately after the January 1, 1992 policy cutoff, Prof. Giupponi will be able to estimate the effect of such a wealth increase on labor supply.

"Estimating pension wealth effects," Prof. Giupponi says, "is useful to inform models of policy evaluation and long-term projections, in a time when demographic trends have increased the potential labor supply of the elderly – women in particular – and its macroeconomic importance, but are simultaneously exerting pressure on the financial sustainability of public old-age support programs."

The Center for Retirement Research at Boston College was established in 1998 through a grant from the Social Security Administration. The Center's mission is to produce first-class research and forge a strong link between the academic community and decision makers in the public and private sectors around an issue of critical importance.