Slower growth of the labour force and an increase in old-age dependency will reduce the growth of aggregate output and output per capita in many developed countries. However, a major question is whether there is any systematic link between demographics and the productivity of those who will...

Over the next four decades, increasing old-age dependency ratios exert an enormous upward pressure on welfare spending in most developed countries. As this is mainly due to existing unfunded public pension schemes, many countries have embarked on far-reaching reforms in this area, strengthening...

We investigate country heterogeneity in cross-country growth regressions. In contrast to the previous literature that focuses on low-income countries, this study also highlights growth determinants in high-income (OECD) countries. We introduce Iterative Bayesian Model Averaging (IBMA) to address...

Recent micro studies have documented extensive downward nominal wage rigidity (DNWR) for job stayers in many OECD countries, but the effect on aggregate variables remains disputed. Using data for hourly nominal wages, we explore the existence of DNWR on wages at the industry level in 19 OECD...

Economic theory predicts that consumption growth rates should be highly correlated across countries. Empirical evidence overwhelmingly rejects this prediction. We examine whether increased financial integration and labour market rigidities can help explain this apparent contradiction between...

When enacting labor market regulation governments face courts that interpret and implement the legal code. We show that the incentives for governments for labor market reform increase with the uncertainty that is involved in the implementation of legal codes through courts. Given that judges...

This paper studies corporate taxation in a model where foreign investment of firms may affect the profitability of the investor firm's domestic activities. In this framework, corporate taxes distort the quality, not just the quantity of foreign direct investment flows. High-tax countries may see...

Using data from the European Social Survey (ESS), we examine the link between income and subjective well-being. We find that, for the whole sample of nineteen European countries, although income is positively correlated with both happiness and life satisfaction, reference income exerts a...

This paper analyses the effect of federalism on fertility and growth. In a model with human capital accumulation and endogenous fertility, two regimes of education finance are compared: central and local education. Using numerical simulation, I find that local education finance yields higher...