The paper asks why retirement can be so abrupt in countries such as France (1/2% of the workforce over 65), yet staged in Japan (8% over 65). We find part of the answer in tax laws that prevent people working and receiving a pension, and make little allowance for fair pension increases if...

In a meritocratic society an individual's economic success is determined by their ability, not by their parents' socio-economic status. We assess whether meritocracy has increased in both the British education system and labour market. The richness of our longitudinal data enables us to look at...

Carefully-matched pairs of written job applications were made to test for age discrimination in hiring. A twenty-one year-old and a thirty-nine year-old woman applied for jobs where a new graduate was sought; men aged twenty-seven and forty-seven, inquired about employment as waiters; women aged...

We compare two policies of increasing British state pension provision: (a) increase the pensionable age of men and women, (b) maintain the existing retirement age but require older workers to work longer per-period hours. There are reasons for policy makers to give serious consideration to the...

This paper seeks to unpick the complex effects of migration, country of birth, and place of residence in Scotland on individual success in the labour market. We pay specific attention to the labour force experience of English-born residents in Scotland, whom the cross sectional literature...

Caste-based quotas in hiring have existed in the public sector in India for decades. Recently there has been debate about introducing similar quotas in private sector jobs. This paper uses an audit study to determine the extent of caste-based discrimination in the Indian private sector. On...

The caste system - a system of elaborately stratified social hierarchy - distinguishes India from most other societies. Among the most distinctive factors of the caste system is the close link between castes and occupations, especially in rural India, with Dalits or Scheduled Castes (SC)...

In a field experiment of age discrimination, pairs of men aged twenty-seven and forty-seven, inquired, by email, about employment as waiters in twenty five Spanish towns. Discrimination against the older waiters, corresponded to the highest rates ever recorded anywhere, by written tests, for...

Using longitudinal data from the Canadian National Population Health Survey (NPHS), we study the relationship between health and employment among older Canadians. We focus on two issues: (1) the possible endogeneity of self-reported health, particularly ?justification bias?, and (2) the relative...

Despite a sequence of labor market reforms in recent years, employment of older workers in Germany is still lower than in many other European countries. The paper explains this by institutional factors that affect labor supply, labor demand and matching, i.e. labor market regulation, human...