Mandatory pension systems can have a negative impact on individual savings and labor supply decisions. In particular, defined benefit pension schemes that are not actuarially fair, can create incentives for early retirement, and therefore, reduce labor supply and the stock of human capital....

This paper incorporates egocentric comparisons into a human capital accumulation model and studies the evolution of positive self image over time. The paper shows that the process of human capital accumulation together with egocentric comparisons imply that positive self image of a cohort is...

This chapter gives an overview of the male labour supply literature, focusing on what that literature implies for the design of the tax-transfer system. According to conventional wisdom, male labour supply is rather insensitive to tax rates. This, in turn, implies that the welfare losses from...

We estimate the relationship between international youth and professional tennis rankings. We find no difference between the predictiveness of rankings from age 14 & Under versus age 16 & Under competitions. The most persistent predictor of professional success is beating older top ranked...

There is a consolidated empirical literature providing evidence of the fact that financial literacy, human capital, savings and stock market participation are interconnected decisions. However, to the best of our knowledge, a theoretical explanation of such connections is missing. In this paper...

This paper examines the relationship between individuals' weight and their employment decisions over the life cycle. I estimate a dynamic stochastic model of individuals' annual joint decisions of occupation, hours worked, and schooling. The model allows body weight to affect non-monetary costs,...

By drawing on neurological and psychological theories of learning, our study introduces a new conceptual framework to analyse the role learning plays in knowledge and skill acquisition. Learning is modelled through four mechanisms defined as individuals' participation in formal, non-formal, and...

An emerging body of literature examines the economic returns to quality of postsecondary education. This literature has predominantly focused on the returns to the most selective universities. However, less is known about the extent to which these gains are realized for the academically marginal...

In this paper, we analyze the higher education choices of Italian secondary school leavers by addressing the roles of university quality, costs and geographical distance to the institution as well as the relationship between students’ choices and their personal and household’s attributes,...

The article focuses on the conditional relationship between various human capital proxies and the size of potential “O-Ring” or “Cobb-Douglas” sectors. We find that that years of schooling are a robust negative predictor of the size of the informal sector, conditioned on national average...