Trends in skill bias and greater turbulence in modern labor markets put wages and employment prospects of unskilled workers under pressure. Weak incentives to utilize and maintain skills over the life-cycle become manifest with the ageing of the population. Reinvention of human capital policies...

Assuming decreasing returns to education and the endogenous supply of qualified and nonqualified labour it is shown to be efficient to supplement a consumption tax with positive incentives for education. If the return from education is isoelastic and if the choice is between (i) subsidizing the...

We examine economic growth, inequality and education when the wellspring of growth is the formation of human capital through a combination of the quality of child-rearing and formal schooling. The existence of multiple steady states is established, including a poverty trap, wherein children work...

Risky health behaviors such as smoking, drinking alcohol, drug use, unprotected sex, and poor diets and sedentary lifestyles (leading to obesity) are a major source of preventable deaths. This chapter overviews the theoretical frameworks for, and empirical evidence on, the economics of risky...

I study the impact of a universal child benefit on fertility and family well-being. I exploit the unanticipated introduction of a new, sizeable, unconditional child benefit in Spain in 2007, granted to all mothers giving birth on or after July 1, 2007. The regression discontinuity-type design...

Mobility of highly-skilled workers affects and is affected by labor market conditions, taxes, and other policies. This paper documents the demographic and fiscal importance of international migration, especially in aging societies, reviews the efficiency and distributional effects of mobility,...

This paper provides a novel justification for using a minimum wage to supplement an optimal tax-and-transfer system. We demonstrate that if labor supply decisions are concentrated along the intensive margin and employment is efficiently rationed, a minimum wage can be socially beneficial by...

In this paper we challenge the conventional wisdom that using workfare as a supplementary screening device to means-testing is socially undesirable when the government objective is welfarist, namely, to ensure that all members of society will attain some minimal level of utility. Our argument...

The enormous speed of change in the working world is associated with greater job insecurity. As a dynamic external flexibilization instrument, temporary agency work is characterized by high labor turnover rates. As a result, agency workers might perceive more job insecurity than permanent staff....