Life cycle savings is proposed as one explanation for much of the increase in savings and economic growth in Asia. The association between the age composition of a nation's population and its savings rate, observed within 16 Asian countries from 1952 to 1992, is reestimated here to be less than...

This paper develops and applies a method for decomposing cross section variability of earnings into components that are forecastable at the time students decide to go to college (heterogeneity) and components that are unforecastable. About 60% of variability in returns to schooling is...

This paper argues that skill formation is a life-cycle process and develops the implications of this insight for Scottish social policy. Families are major producers of skills, and a successful policy needs to promote effective families and to supplement failing ones. We present evidence that...

Most research on the relationship between health and socioeconomic status (SES) controls for changing age or investigates the relationship for a particular age range. This paper, however, examines changes in the relationship across ages, as well as controls for potential endogeneity in the...

Women born later experience greater earnings growth volatility at given ages than older cohorts. This implies a welfare loss due to increased earnings risk. However, German registry data for the years 2001-2016 reveal a moderation in higher-order earnings risk: Men and women born later face...

We decompose earnings risk into contributions from hours and wage shocks. To distinguish between hours shocks, modeled as innovations to the marginal disutility of work, and labor supply reactions to wage shocks we formulate a life-cycle model of consumption and labor supply. For estimation we...

Pension systems have recently been under scrutiny because of the expected population ageing threatening its sustainability. This paper's contribution to the debate is from a political economic perspective as it uses data from a choice experiment to investigate individual preferences for an...