Most people’s wellbeing is permanently affected by unemployment. This column argues that the unhappiness is due to a loss of identity, rather than daily experiences. Using German data, it shows that the long-term unemployed become happier upon entering retirement, thus changing social category, even though this does not change their daily lives.

As if today’s problems aren’t enough, in the coming years Europe faces what economists are calling a ‘demographic timebomb’, with ageing populations placing an unsustainable burden on already precarious public finances. In order to encourage more people to save for themselves, this column argues that using a psychological intervention can increase contributions to retirement savings accounts by up to 2.9% of income.

While the retirement age in most developed countries is going up, this column looks at what happens when it goes down. In some countries, those who work in physically demanding jobs are demanding the right to retire earlier. This column finds that people should be careful what they wish for.

In January the UK government launched an initiative to help the elderly downsize into smaller homes – and provoked the ire of pensioner groups nationwide. This reluctance to downsize to among the elderly perplexes economists, who maintain that leveraging housing wealth can help pensioners maintain a good standard of living on a fixed income. CEPR DP8889 investigates what is behind European pensioners’ puzzling housing decisions.

In Mexico, the average male worker retires at 75. In Bulgaria, he does so at 58. This column argues that an economy’s composition of occupations matters for its average effective retirement age as the nature of different occupations leads workers to retire at different ages. It suggests the differences in occupational composition explain up to 40% of the observed cross-country variation in retirement age.