We study the effect of permanent income innovations on health for a prime-aged population. Using information on more than half a million individuals sampled over a twenty-five year period in three different cross-sectional surveys we aggregate data by date-of-birth cohort to construct a...

We consider an economy where individuals privately choose effort and trade competitively priced securities that pay off with effort-determined probability. We show that if insurance against a negative shock is sufficiently incomplete, then standard functional form restrictions ensure that...

We examine the remarkable rise in absenteeism among Norwegian employees since the early 1990's, with particular emphasis on disentangling the roles of cohort, age, and time. Based on a fixed effects model, we show that individual age-adjusted absence propensities have risen even more than...

Relative cohort size – the ratio of young to prime-age adults – and relative income – the income of young adults relative to their material aspirations, as instrumented using the income of older families their parents' age – have experienced dramatic changes over the past 40 years....

This paper looks at how individual preferences for the allocation of government spending change along the life cycle. Using the Life in Transition Survey II for 34 countries of Europe and Central Asia, we find that older individuals are less likely to support a rise in government outlays on...

Political regimes influence contents of education and criteria used to select and evaluate students. We study the impact of a socialist education on the likelihood of obtaining a college degree and on several labor market outcomes by exploiting the reorganization of the school system in East...

This paper conducts a cohort analysis of labor participation in urban Mexico in recent decades. The rates analyzed are the labor force participation, the unemployment rate, and the employment shares of the formal and informal salaried sectors, as well as of self-employment. These rates are...

This paper applies semiparametric regression models using penalized splines to investigate the profile of well-being over the life span. Splines have the advantage that they do not require a priori assumptions about the form of the curve. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS)...

We study the aggregate labor force participation behavior of women over a 25-year period in Turkey using a synthetic panel approach. In our decomposition of age, year, and cohort effects, we use three APC models that have received close scrutiny of the demography community. We rely on...

Most of the literature that exploits business cycle variation at birth to study long-run effects of economic conditions on health later in life is based on pre-1940 birth cohorts. They were born in times where social safety nets were largely absent and they grew up in societies with relatively...