Despite substantial increases in longevity, the age of retirement in the industrialized countries has steadily fallen throughout most of the 20th century. In France, for instance, the employment-population ratio of 55-64 year-old males fell from 74% in 1970 to 38.5% in 2000. In most other OECD...

We present evidence that an increase in investment as a share of GDP predicts a higher growth rate of output per worker, not only temporarily, but also in the steady state. These results are found using pooled annual data for a large panel of countries, using pooled data for non-overlapping...

This paper focuses on the importance data issues to the analysis of growth, poverty and economic inequality. We introduce a number of major databases frequently used in applied research on growth, poverty and global and international inequality. A discussion of data quality, data consistency,...

This paper examines the causal relationship between inequality and a number of macroeconomic variables frequently found in the inequality and growth literature. These include growth, openness, wages, and liberalisation. We review the existing cross-country empirical evidence on the effects of...

This paper uses data from 20 OECD countries to investigate the impact of welfare state institutions (especially employment protection, wage bargaining and work incentives) on the functioning of the labour market both theoretically and empirically. It shows that the impact of welfare state...

This paper investigates the link between health care expenditures and GDP for a sample of 21 OECD countries using recent developed panel cointegration techniques. In contrast to previous studies, the analysis accounts for the fact that health care expenditures are not only determined by income....

Does a country?s level of unemployment have an impact on the long-run growth rate? Incorporating unemployment into a generalised augmented Solow-type growth model, yields some answers to this question. In particular, we show that the impact of unemployment on productivity growth heavily depends...

Two of the main forces driving European emigration in the late nineteenth century were real wage gaps between sending and receiving regions and demographic booms in the low-wage sending regions (directly augmenting the supply of potential movers as well as indirectly making already-measured...

This paper examines the impact of capital market integration (CMI) on higher education and economic growth. We take into account that participation in higher education is non-compulsory and depends on individual choice. Integration increases (decreases) the incentives to participate in higher...

Why are socially beneficial reforms not implemented? One simple answer to this question (which has received little attention in the literature) is that this may be caused by generalized uncertainty about the effectiveness of reforms. If agents are unsure about whether a proposed reform will...