This paper explores the role of marriage when markets are incomplete so that individuals cannot diversify their idiosyncratic labor income risk. Ceteris paribus, an individual would prefer to marry a hedge (i.e. a spouse whose income is negatively correlated with her own) as it raises her...

Why do some U.S. states have higher levels of marital formation than others? This paper introduces an economic model wherin a state s representative individual may choose to marry in order to diversify his or her idiosyncratic income risk. The paper demonstrates that such a diversification...

In this paper we consider a risk averse worker who is moving back and forth between employment and unemployment; layoffs are random and beyond the worker s influence, while the re-employment chance is directly affected by search effort. We characterize the worker s optimal savings and job-search...

The new information and communication technology, ICT, induces households to take over tasks from firms and government agencies, using tools and systems provided by these very same organizations. The result is often joint production activities. We argue that the importance of ICT for the...

This paper studies within-family decision making regarding investment in income protection for surviving spouses. A change in US pension law (the Retirement Equity Act of 1984) is used as an instrument to derive predictions both from a simple Nash-bargaining model of the household and from the...

In this model of education, where individuals are exposed both to educational risk and to wage risk within the skilled sector, successful graduation depends both on individual effort to study and on public resources. We show that insuring the present risks is a dichotomic task: Wage risk is...

We study the dynamics of the quantity and quality of teachers in the framework of dynamic general equilibrium OLG model. The quantity and quality are jointly set by a government agency wishing to maximize the quality of basic education per student while being bound by teachers’ collective...

We provide evidence that the robust association between cognitive skills and economic growth reflects a causal effect of cognitive skills and supports the economic benefits of effective school policy. We develop a new common metric that allows tracking student achievement across countries, over...

In a model with ex-ante homogenous households, earnings risk and a general earnings function, we derive the optimal linear labor tax rate and optimal linear education subsidies. The optimal income tax trades off social insurance against incentives to work and to invest in human capital....

We use Swiss data to test whether intergenerational educational mobility is affected by the age at which children first enter (primary) school. Early age at school entry significantly affects mobility and reduces the relative advantage of children of better educated parents. -- Age at entry ;...