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...

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...

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...

Children's outcomes are strongly correlated with those of their neighbours. The extent to which this is causal is the subject of an extensive literature. An identification problem exists because people with similar characteristics are observed to live in close proximity. Another major difficulty...

In France, almost one in five 15 year olds lives in a home with at least two children per bedroom. More than 60% of these adolescents have been held back in primary or middle school, a proportion that is more than 20 points higher than it is on average for adolescents of the same age. This Paper...

Several recent studies based on 'exogenous' sources of variation in education outcomes show Instrumental Variables (IV) estimates of returns to schooling that are substantially higher than the corresponding Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) estimates. Card (1995a) suggests that these results can be...

The educational attainment of second generation immigrants is of crucial importance for their subsequent labour market success in Germany. While the schooling outcomes of natives improved in recent decades, German-born children of immigrants did not partake in this development. The Paper applies...

This paper uses variation created by parental deaths in the amount of time children spend with each parent to examine whether the parent-child correlation in schooling outcomes stems from a causal relationship. Using a large sample of Israeli children who lost one parent during childhood, we...