This paper explores the power of personality traits both as predictors and as causes of academic and economic success, health, and criminal activity. Measured personality is interpreted as a construct derived from an economic model of preferences, constraints, and information. Evidence is...

This paper advances a structural inter-temporal model of labour supply that is able to simulate the dynamics of labour supply in a continuous setting and to circumvent two main drawbacks of most of the existing models. The first limitation is the inability to incorporate individual heterogeneity...

This paper provides estimates for the Mercosur countries of the Frisch elasticity – i.e., the elasticity of substitution between worked hours and real wages holding constant the marginal utility of wealth. We find a strong heterogeneity, with estimated elasticities ranging from 12.8 in...

How can public pension systems be reformed to ensure fiscal stability in the face of increasing life expectancy? To address this pressing open question in public finance, we estimate a life-cycle model in which the optimal employment, retirement and consumption decisions of forward-looking...

Research on intergenerational income mobility is based on current income since data on lifetime income are typically not available for two generations. However, using snapshots of income over shorter periods causes a so-called life-cycle bias if the snapshots cannot mimic lifetime outcomes....

Research on intergenerational income mobility has shown stronger persistence between parental and offspring's income in the UK than in Sweden. We use similar data sets for the two countries to explore whether these cross-national differences show up already early in offspring's life in outcomes...

Pediatricians should consider the costs and benefits of preventing rather than treating childhood diseases. We present an integrated developmental approach to child and adult health that considers the costs and benefits of interventions over the life cycle. We suggest policies to promote child...

We show that within a life-cycle skill accumulation model, IV identification of the return to schooling parameter is either achieved at any point in the life-cycle where the level of skills accumulated beyond school completion for compliers is exactly equal to the post-schooling skill level of...

We propose an original model of human capital investments after leaving school in which individuals differ in their initial human capital obtained at school, their rate of return, their costs of human capital investments and their terminal values of human capital at a fixed date in the future....

We investigate the relationship between life cycle wages and individual membership of unemployment insurance schemes in Denmark. We separate permanent from transitory wages and characterise them using membership of unemployment insurance funds. We find that unemployment insurance is associated...