Aging creates financial troubles for PAYG pension systems, since the share of retirees to workers increases. An often advocated policy response is to increase retirement age. Ironically, however, the political support for this policy may actually be hindered by population aging. Using Swiss...

The recent fears of a sovereign debt crisis have spurred interest in the sustainability of public debt. There are two different approaches to the assessment of sustainability: the use of sustainability gap indicators (Blanchard et al., 1990) and the time series approach (Trehan and Walsh, 1988)....

We use real‐time annual data on the fiscal balance, government current spending, current revenues and net capital outlays as published at a half yearly frequency in the OECD Economic Outlook for 25 OECD countries. For each fiscal year t we have a number of forecasts, a first release, and...

We estimate spillover effects of a fiscal shock in one member country in the euro area on outputs of the rest of the members, using a Global Vector Autoregression (GVAR) model. We compare the effects of a domestic fiscal shock with those of a similar size area-wide shock expressed as a weighted...

To assess whether earnings-dependent maternity leave positively impacts fertility and narrows the baby gap between high educated (high earning) and low educated (low earning) women, I exploit a major maternity leave benefit reform in Germany that considerably increases the financial incentives...

In several OECD countries age-targeted wage subsidies have been introduced to increase the employment of older workers, but evidence on their effectiveness is scarce. This paper examines the effects of a permanent wage cost subsidy in Belgium on the employment rate, working time and hourly wage....

A demographic transition resulting from an increase in the size of the young working age population can be a blessing or a curse for economic performance. We focus on the political stability effects of a larger youth population and hypothesize that corruption matters in this nexus. Using panel...

The effect of changes in demographic structure on medium-run trends of key macroeconomic variables is estimated using a Panel VAR of 21 OECD economies. The panel data variability assists the identification of direct effects of demographics, while the dynamic structure uncovers long-term effects....

We use longitudinal, disease-level data to analyze the impact of pharmaceutical innovation on longevity and medical expenditure in Sweden, where mean age at death increased by 1.88 years during the period 1997-2010. Pharmaceutical innovation is estimated to have increased mean age at death by...

We investigate the responsiveness of individual retirement decisions to changes in financial incentives. A reform increased women's normal retirement age (NRA) in two steps from age 62 to age 63 first and then to age 64. At the same time retirement at the previous NRA became possible at a...