The past 25 years has seen substantial change in the social safety nets for families with children in the US and Canada. Both countries have moved away from cash welfare but the US has done so relying more exclusively on inwork benefits with work requirements. This paper examines this evolution...

The extent of the demographic changes in Europe is dramatic and will deeply affect future labor, financial and goods markets. The expected strain on public budgets and especially social security has already received prominent attention, but aging poses many other economic challenges that...

We examine the link between equity risk premiums and demographic changes using a very long sample over the twentieth century for the US, Japan, UK, Germany and France, and a shorter sample covering the last third of the twentieth century for fifteen countries. We find that demographic variables...

As much like other industrialized countries, in recent decades the employment rate in Germany for those aged 55 to 69 had been declining first to considerably rise again afterwards. This paper investigates the role of structural policy changes, in particular reforms of the pension system, since...

The effect of website provision on the demand for German women's magazines is analyzed using differentiated product demand models estimated on panel data that cover the period 1990 2000. Descriptive evidence on the magazines' website contents suggests that websites are used to provide...

By age 77 a plurality of women in wealthy Western societies are widows. Comparing older (aged 70+) married women to widows in the American Time Use Survey 2003-18 and linking the data to the Current Population Survey allow inferring the short- and longer-term effects of an arguably exogenous...

We document strikingly similar gender differences in financial literacy across countries. When asked to answer questions that measure knowledge of basic financial concepts, women are less likely than men to answer correctly and more likely to indicate that they do not know the answer. In...

Emerging economies are exposed to severe and sudden shortages of international financial resources. Yet domestic agents seem not to undertake enough precautions against these sudden stops. Following our previous work, we highlight in this paper the central role played by limited domestic...

This paper assesses whether insurers' state taxes reduce purchases of property-casualty coverage. Tests are conducted using state aggregates of insurer-level data from publicly-available, annual accounting reports for 1993, 1994, and 1995. A positive relation between self-insurance and state...

We formalize the notion that GATT exceptions such as antidumping and escape clause actions can act as insurance for import competing sectors affected by adverse price shocks. We use a general equilibrium model with several import competing sectors and assume incomplete markets so that agents...