This chapter provides a narrative review of the literature relating socioeconomic circumstances early in life to mental health and well-being later in life. It starts by highlighting the various contributions focusing on associations, then moves on to the literature attempting to identify causal...

This paper studies the impact of national fiscal rules on government size as measured by the ratio of government expenditures to gross domestic product. We develop a model of the budgetary process and show that a common pool problem may arise which can be mitigated through fiscal rules. We test...

This chapter provides a narrative review of the literature relating socioeconomic circumstances early in life to mental health and well-being later in life. It starts by highlighting the various contributions focusing on associations, then moves on to the literature attempting to identify causal...

We study the impact of a fully-funded social security system in an economy with heterogeneous consumers. The unobservability of individual health conditions leads to adverse selection in the private annuity market. Introducing social security — which is immune to adverse selection — affects...

Most of the literature that exploits business cycle variation at birth to study long-run effects of economic conditions on health later in life is based on pre-1940 birth cohorts. They were born in times where social safety nets were largely absent and they grew up in societies with relatively...

We study the impact of a fully-funded social security system in an economy with heterogeneous consumers. The unobservability of individual health conditions leads to adverse selection in the private annuity market. Introducing social security—which is immune to adverse selection—affects...