In this paper we investigate the contribution of health related behaviors to the education gradient, using an empirical approach that addresses the endogeneity of both education and behaviors in the health production function. We apply this approach to a multi-country data set, which includes 12...

At least one of every five marriages is consanguineous (between couples who are second cousins or closer) in the Middle East and North Africa, and the rate is higher than 50 percent in some parts of the world. Consanguineous marriage generates serious health problems for the offspring and...

Today's labor-scarce economies have open trade and closed immigration policies, while a century ago they had just the opposite, open immigration and closed trade policies. Why the inverse policy correlation, and why has it persisted for almost two centuries? This paper seeks answers to this dual...

Data from a range of different environments indicate that the incidence of death is not randomly distributed across families but, rather, that there is a clustering of death amongst siblings. A natural explanation of this would be that there are (observed or unobserved) differences across...

The age at which children leave the parental home differs considerably across countries. In this paper we argue that lower job insecurity of parents and higher job insecurity of children delay emancipation. We provide aggregate evidence which supports this hypothesis for 12 European countries...

This paper considers an economic analysis of intergenerational transition of ethnic and social trait. We consider the level of social traits chosen by parents and its effect on their children's choice of ethnic and social traits when reaching adulthood. We develop a theory that suggests that...

This paper examines differences in China's ethnic majority and minority patterns of labor force participation and decomposes these differences into treatment and endowment effects using the technique developed by Borooah and Iyer (2005). Population census data are used to estimate...

By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women's happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women's declining relative well-being is...

There are significant effects of changing demographics on economic indicators: growth in GDP especially, but also the current account balance and gross capital formation. The 15-24 age group appears to be one of the key age groups in these effects, with increases in that age group exerting...

Why did employment growth – high in the last decade – take place at the expense of young workers in the countries of Central and Southern Europe? This is the question addressed in this paper. Youth unemployment has approached or exceeded 20% despite a variety of factors, common to most EU...