Immigrants are widely perceived as being highly entrepreneurial and important for economic growth and innovation. This is reflected in immigration policies and many developed countries have created special visas and entry requirements in an attempt to attract immigrant entrepreneurs. Not...

Increasing longevity causes an upward trend in the dependency ratio in many countries. This raises concerns about the financial sustainability of social security schemes, and reform initiatives and proposals abound. It is shown that a fundamental policy choice inevitably arises since a given...

Much has been written about the modern obesity epidemic, and historical BMIs are low compared to their modern counterparts. However, interpreting BMI variation is difficult because BMIs increase when weight increases or when stature decreases, and the two have different implications for human...

This study compares two US BMI data sets, one from the 1800s and the other from the early 2000s, to determine how black and white male obesity rates varied between 1800 and 2000. The proportion of individuals who were obese rather than overweight is responsible much of the increase in obesity....

This paper examines how marital and fertility patterns have changed along racial and educational lines for men and women. Historically, women with more education have been the least likely to marry and have children, but this marriage gap has eroded as the returns to marriage have changed....

It is widely debated whether immigrants who live among co-ethnics are less willing to integrate into the host society. Exploiting the quasi-experimental guest worker placement across German regions during the 1960/70s as well as information on immigrants’ inter-ethnic contact networks and...

Recent European legislation on immigration has revealed a particular paradox on migration policies. On the one hand, the trend of recent legislation points to the increasing closure of frontiers (OECD 1999, 2001,2004), trying to limit the immigrants’ stock. On the other hand, there is an...

The “natural” in the natural rate of unemployment is a misnomer, insofar as unemployment does not occur in nature. The concept is especially misleading because many economists and media commentators inappropriately equate it with “full” employment. As a consequence, endemic un- and...

We consider a bargaining model in which husband and wife decide on the allocation of time and disposable income. Since her bargaining power would go down otherwise more strongly, the wife agrees to have a child only if the husband also leaves the labor market for a while. The daddy months...

Previous studies report a wide range of estimates for how female labor supply responds to childcare prices. We shed new light on this question using a reform that raised the prices of public daycare. Parents respond by reducing public daycare and increasing childcare at home. Parents also reduce...