BiB-Research | 30.07.2025Two new research projects at BiB

Do divorces increase the risk of death?

This question is being addressed by the DFG-funded project “Divorce and Diagnosis – Register-based analyses of the impact of divorce on health and employment histories (DiDi)” based on a life course approach. “In our project, we use register data from the German pension insurance system, which we link to other data sources. These contain detailed information on health status and employment and partnership histories. We look at the influence of divorce on disease diagnoses and on the employment transitions of divorced people,” explains project leader Dr. Pavel Grigoriev.

A central hypothesis is that women who earned additional income in their partnership while their male partner was the main breadwinner are more severely affected in terms of their health after divorce than other women. “We assume that divorce has both short-term and long-term negative effects on cardiovascular disease,” says Dr. Grigoriev. The multidisciplinary project, which started in April 2025, is being carried out jointly by the BiB, the Hertie School, and Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin. It is supported by the Research Data Center of the German Pension Insurance (FDZ–RV). The BiB research group “Mortality” is responsible for the “Divorce and Death” module within the project.

How long are pensions paid?

Since July 2025, another new project has been investigating the development of pension duration between 2005 and 2022. The background to this is the imminent retirement of the baby boomers born in the 1950s and 1960s and the associated burden on the statutory pension insurance system. “Among other things, we are analyzing which individual sociodemographic characteristics are associated with the duration of pension receipt according to pension amount and with changes in these differences,” explains project manager Dr. Andreas Mergenthaler.

In addition, BiB researchers are using scenarios to examine how the structure of the pension stock will change according to pension amount until 2040. The Research Network on Old-Age Provision is funding the project “Trends in duration of pension receipt: differences according to pension amount and impact on prevalence (ERDA)” from 2025 to 2028. It is being carried out at the BiB in the research area “Aging, Mortality, and Population Dynamics” by the research group “Aging and Old Age.” The Mortality Research Group is collaborating on selected work packages in the ERDA project. Dr. Mergenthaler hopes that the project will provide answers to questions about the extent to which differences in pension duration according to pension level are gender- and region-specific and what fiscal and distributional policy implications this has for the statutory pension insurance system.