In recent decades economists have turned their attention to data that asks people how happy or satisfied they are with their lives. Much of the early research concluded that the role of income in determining well-being was limited, and that only income relative to others was related to...

Does the average level of sickness absence in a neighborhood affect individual sickness absence through social interaction on the neighborhood level? To answer this question, we consider evidence of local benefit-dependency cultures. Well-known methodological problems in this type of analysis...

Early retirement is usually explained as a supply-side phenomenon. However, early retirement can also be a demand-side phenomenon arising from a firm's profit maximization behavior. This paper analyzes voluntary and involuntary early retirement based on international microdata covering 19...

This paper estimates the causal effect of the wage on the recruitment rate at the establishment level. During the 1990s, the wage setting for certified teachers in Norway was completely centralized, with a wage premium of about 10 percent at schools with severe recruitment problems in the past...

Survey measures of the reservation wage reflect both the consumption-leisure trade-off and job search concerns (the arrival rate of job offers and the wage distribution). We examine what a survey measure of the reservation wage reveals about labor supply when search concerns are absent. To this...

This article analyzes the effect of public policy intervention in the production of health capital on fertility, private investment in children's health and education and human capital accumulation. I have used a growth model with endogenous fertility, in which the usual parental trade-off...

Marriage and divorce decisions are influenced by the institutional environment they are made in. One example is the social insurance system, which acts as a substitute for within-household insurance against economic shocks. In this paper, we quantify the importance of household-level insurance...

Does the culture in which a woman grows up influence her labor market decisions once she has had a child? And to what extent can exposure to a different cultural group in adulthood shape maternal labor supply? To address these questions, we exploit the setting of the German reunification. A...

Most economic models assume that time preferences are stable over time, but the evidence on their long-term stability is lacking. We study whether and how time preferences change over the life cycle, exploiting representative long-term panel data. We provide new evidence that discount rates...

We study the impact of endogenous longevity on optimal tax progressivity and inequality in an overlapping generations model with skill heterogeneity. Higher tax progressivity decreases both the longevity gap and net income inequality, but at the expense of lower average lifetime and lower...