Many Belgian retire well before the statutory retirement age. Numerous exit routes from the labor force can be identified: old-age pensions, conventional early retirement, disability insurance, and unemployment insurance are the most prominent ones. We analyze the retirement decision of Belgian...

The paper studies retirement behavior of wage‐earners in Belgium – for the first time using rich survey data to explore retirement incentives as faced by individuals. Specifically, we use SHARE data to estimate a model à la Stock and Wise (1990). Exploring the longitudinal nature of...

In this paper we examine how children affect happiness and relationships within a family by analyzing two unique questions in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth's 1997 cohort. We find that (a) presence of children is associated with a loss of spousal love; (b) loss of spousal love is...

We study the effect of the size of the welfare state on family outcomes in OECD member countries. Exploiting exogenous variation in public social spending, due to varying degrees of political fractionalization (i.e. the number of relevant parties involved in the legislative process), we show...

Under the tender years doctrine in effect until the 1970's, custody was virtually always awarded to the mother upon divorce. Gender-neutral custody laws introduced beginning in the 1970's provided married fathers, in principle, equal rights to custody. Subsequent marriage-neutral laws extended...

We evaluate the effects of wage subsidy programs for the disabled, in particular, their potential for welfare-loss reduction vs. deadweight loss creation. We do this in the context of the Danish Flexjob scheme, a large, nation-wide scheme that was implemented in 1998 and targeted towards...

This paper explores how extended unemployment insurance (UI) benefits targeted to older workers affect early retirement and social welfare. The trade-off of optimal UI between consumption smoothing and moral hazard requires accounting for the entire early retirement system, which often includes...

Canadian disability policy has come a long way in the past century. However, in contrast with the evidence that disability is not permanent for most, current disability support programs still carry the old static view of permanent disability. By employing a dynamic panel data model of labour...

We study the short-run and long-run economic impact of one of the largest losses that an individual can face; the death of a child. We utilize unique merged registers on the entire Swedish population, combining information on the date and cause of death with parents' labor market outcomes, health...

I use a dynamic mixed multinomial logit model with unobserved heterogeneity to study the impact of work limiting disabilities on disaggregated labour choices. The first seven waves of the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey are used to investigate this relationship. Findings...