This paper examines the impact of labor market institutions (LMI) on business cycle (BC) synchronization. The authors first develop a two-country right-to-manage model of wage bargaining. They find that, following a symmetric demand change, cross-country differences in LMI generate divergent...

The Roy model predicts that migrants will be disproportionately drawn from the lower half of the educational distribution of the sending country if the sending country has a higher return to schooling. However, Mexican immigrants in the U.S. tend to be disproportionately drawn from the middle of...

Este estudio compara las diferencias de cobertura en los sistemas de pensiones de capitalizacion individual en tres pa’ses de Latinoamerica. En Chile, Colombia y Mexico, aun cuando cada uno de ellos tiene sistema de pensiones de contribuciones definidas, hay diferencias significativas en el...

According to the life-cycle model, mortality risk will influence both retirement and the desire to annuitize wealth. The authors estimate the effect of subjective survival probabilities on retirement and on the claiming of Social Security benefits because delayed claiming is equivalent to the...

The authors examine how public and private pension and health insurance systems affect retirement transitions. In many countries, public and private pension eligibility, as well as access to health insurance varies between self-employed and wage and salary workers, and these differences are...

The simple one-good model of life-cycle consumption requires "consumption smoothing." However, British and U.S. households apparently reduce consumption at retirement and the reduction cannot be explained by the life-cycle model. An interpretation is that retirees are surprised by the inadequacy...

It is widely believed that health plays a major role in retirement decisions. The most important problem in including health in retirement models is the lack of availability of a good measure of health at the individual level in existing data sets. This problem is exacerbated when a model...

Some studies suggest that people can maintain their cognitive abilities through "mental exercise." This has not been unequivocally proven. Retirement is associated with a large change in a person's daily routine and environment. In this paper, the authors propose two mechanisms how retirement...

The authors use a calibrated stochastic life-cycle model of endogenous health spending, asset accumulation and retirement to investigate the causes behind the increase in health spending and life expectancy over the period 1965-2005. They estimate that technological change along with the...

What are the health impacts of retirement? As talk of raising retirement ages in pensions and social security schemes continues around the world, it is important to know both the costs and benefits for the individual as well as government budgets. The authors use the Survey of Health, Aging and...