Taking a European cross-country perspective, this paper addresses the most important issues in the nexus of population ageing and labor markets. We start from a descriptive overview of the demographic change currently shaping European societies. The subsequent section intensively discusses the...

In this paper, we present a matching model with adverse selection that explains why flows into and out of unemployment are much lower in Europe compared to North America, while employment-to-employment flows are similar in the two continents. In the model, firms use discretion in terms of whom...

This paper suggests that in the US context, workers tend to invest in general human capital especially since they face little employment protection and low unemployment benefits, while the European model (generous benefits and higher duration of jobs) favors specific human capital investments....

Europeans have worked less than Americans since the 1970s. In this paper, we quantify the relative importance of the extensive and intensive margins of aggregate hours of market work on the observed differences. Our counterfactual exercises show that the two dimensions of the extensive margin,...

Does the supply of a welfare state create its own demand? Many economic scholars studying welfare arrangements refer to Say's law and insinuate a self-destructive welfare state. However, little is known about the empirical validity of these assumptions and hypotheses. We study the dynamic effect...

The current crisis, while of a global nature, has affected national labor markets to a varying extent. While some countries have experienced a steep increase in unemployment, employment in other developed economies has not fallen in parallel with a significant decline in GDP. Our analysis shows...

We survey the recent literature on the effects of active labor market policies on individual labor market outcomes like employment and income, for adult female individuals without work in European countries. We consider skill-training programs, monitoring and sanctions, job search assistance,...

The Great Recession did not only affect European countries to a varying extent, its impact on national labour markets and on specific socio-economic groups in those markets also varied greatly. Institutional arrangements such as employment protection, unemployment insurance benefits and minimum...

We analyze lifetime earnings histories of white males during 1960-2010 and categorize the labor force status of every worker as either working full-time, partially retired or fully retired. We find that the fraction of partially retired workers has risen dramatically (from virtually 0 to 15...

The persistence of U.S. unemployment has risen with each of the last three recessions, raising the specter that future U.S. recessions might look more like the Eurosclerosis experience of the 1980s than traditional V-shaped recoveries of the past. In this paper, we revisit possible explanations...