Private pension provision faces the challenging task of providing stable income streams during retirement. The challenge has increased markedly in the last decades due to volatile financial markets, falling interest rates and the withdrawal of employers and external insurers as risk bearers of...

The Ben-Porath (1967) mechanism suggests that prolonging the period during which individuals may receive returns on their investment spurs investment in human capital and causes growth. An important, albeit implicit implication of this mechanism is that the total labour input over a lifetime...

This paper presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of the role of life expectancy for optimal schooling and lifetime labor supply. The results of a simple prototype Ben-Porath model with age-specific survival rates show that an increase in lifetime labor supply is not a necessary, nor a...

This Paper claims that technical progress induces early retirement of older workers. It supports this claim both theoretically and empirically. We present a model where part of human capital is technology-specific, so that technical progress erodes some existing human capital. This affects...

This paper discusses the specificities of the labor market for older workers. It discusses the implications of those specificities for the effect of labor market institutions on the employability of those workers. It shows that while unemployment benefits indexed backwards and hiring costs are...

We study the effects of a conditional cash transfers program on school enrollment and performance in Mexico. We provide a theoretical framework for analyzing the dynamic educational process including the endogeneity and uncertainty of performance at school (passing grades) and the effect of a...

We investigate the racial gap in test scores between white and non-white students in Britain both in levels and differences across the school years. We find that there is a substantial racial gap in test scores, especially between ages 7 and 11, and a less severe one between ages 11 and 16. It...

Using longitudinal data from the British National Child Development Study, this paper examines gender differences in the determinants of work-related training. The analysis covers a crucial decade in the working lives of the 1958 birth cohort of young men and women – the years spanning the...

We model education as an investment in human capital that, like other investments, is appropriately evaluated in a framework that accounts for risk as well as return. In contrast to dominant wage-premia approach to calculating the returns to education, but which implicitly ignores risk, we...

This paper investigates the importance of parents reading to their young children. Using Australian data we find that parental reading to children at age 4 to 5 has positive and significant effects on reading skills and cognitive skills of these children at least up to age 10 or 11. Our findings...