Overview
Axel Börsch-Supan is a German labor economist and the founding director of the Munich Center for the Economics of Aging (MEA) at the University of Mannheim / Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy. He is also a Research Associate at NBER. His research spans retirement behavior, pension systems, health and wealth in old age, and cross-national comparisons of aging populations. He is the principal architect of SHARE (Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe), the European analogue to the HRS. He is co-author of Heiss et al. (2007), a latent-health model on HRS data addressing selective mortality in health trajectory estimation.
Key Contributions
- Börsch-Supan and Ludwig (2005) — Aging, Pension Reform, and Capital Flows: Co-authored the multi-country OLG simulation showing that OECD demographic aging pushes capital outflows to younger developing economies, that PAYG-to-funded pension reform amplifies then reverses these flows via the "double burden" transition mechanism, and that no country can fully self-insure through domestic reform alone when global capital markets transmit aging shocks internationally. See Overlapping Generations Model, Alexander Ludwig.
- SHARE: Designed and oversees the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe — a longitudinal multi-country panel covering 27+ countries and the primary data infrastructure for empirical aging research in Europe.
- Heiss et al. (2007) — co-author; latent health model with Ornstein-Uhlenbeck heterogeneity on HRS data; selective mortality bias in observed health transitions. See Morbidity-Mortality Distinction.
- German pension reform and DI uptake (Börsch-Supan and Jürges 2012): Co-authored the analysis of Germany's five-phase pension reform history (1957–2008), showing that DI enrollment tracks institutional rule changes rather than health trends. Key findings: cohort-level hazard discontinuities from 1972/1978/1984 reforms; LFP conditional on health dropped by ~34 pp from 1970 to 2000 at the same mortality risk; German DI diagnosis shift from cardiovascular to mental/musculoskeletal. Summary verdict: "disability insurance is mostly a train on its own track." See DI Uptake and Health Decoupling.
- Cross-national DI and health research: Using SHARE, ELSA, and HRS, showed that cross-sectional health differences and adverse health events cannot explain cross-national DI recipiency rate differences (Börsch-Supan 2005, 2008; Börsch-Supan and Roth 2010). Designed and oversees SHARE — the European analogue to the HRS covering 27+ countries.
- Retirement, social networks, and cognition (Börsch-Supan and Schuth 2013): Using SHARE Waves 1–4, documented that early retirees experience gradual social network contraction (−0.014 persons/year) and cognitive decline (−0.019 delayed recall points/year), with network shrinkage partially mediating the cognitive decline effect. Disability retirees show a distinct trajectory: a large immediate CASP-12 well-being loss (−0.510) driven by status/stigma rather than elapsed time. Descriptive OLS; no causal identification.
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