Economists have mainly focused on human capital accumulation, rather than on the causes and consequences of human capital depreciation in late adulthood. To investigate how human capital depreciates over the life cycle, we examine how a newly introduced pension program, the National Rural...

We study an OLG model with child policies and a PAYG pension with endogenous retirement and fertility. The result of the planned economy is compared to the decentralized competitive equilibrium deriving optimal policies. We show that in the presence of a PAYG pension system, the optimal policy...

While there is a vast literature considering the labour market effects of immigration, less has been done to investigate how immigration affects the educational choices of young natives. Using Italian provincial data and an instrumental variables strategy, we show that the recent increase in the...

We investigate the impact of student work experience on later hiring chances. To completely rule out potential endogeneity, we present a field experiment in which various forms of student work experience are randomly disclosed by more than 1000 fictitious graduates applying for jobs in Belgium....

This paper studies the design of optimal contracts in dynamic environments where agents learn by doing. We derive a condition under which contracts are fully incentive compatible. A closed-form solution is obtained when agents have CARA utility. It shows that human capital accumulation...

Risky health behaviors such as smoking, drinking alcohol, drug use, unprotected sex, and poor diets and sedentary lifestyles (leading to obesity) are a major source of preventable deaths. This chapter overviews the theoretical frameworks for, and empirical evidence on, the economics of risky...

The social and the private returns to education differ when education can increase productivity, and also be used to signal productivity. We show how instrumental variables can be used to separately identify and estimate the social and private returns to education within the employer learning...

We examine how informational frictions impact schooling and work outcomes. To do so, we estimate a dynamic structural model where individuals face uncertainty about their academic ability and productivity, which respectively determine their schooling utility and wages. Our framework accounts for...

This paper studies the design of optimal contracts in dynamic environments where agents learn by doing. We derive a condition under which contracts are fully incentive compatible. A closed-form solution is obtained when agents have CARA utility. It shows that human capital accumulation...

Risky health behaviors such as smoking, drinking alcohol, drug use, unprotected sex, and poor diets and sedentary lifestyles (leading to obesity) are a major source of preventable deaths. This chapter overviews the theoretical frameworks for, and empirical evidence on, the economics of risky...