We study whether cultural attitudes towards gender, the young, and leisure are significant determinants of the evolution over time of the employment rates of women and of the young, and of hours worked in OECD countries. Beyond controlling for a larger menu of policies, institutions and...

Labor market institutions, via their effect on the wage structure, affect the investment decisions of firms in labor markets with frictions. This observation helps explain rising wage inequality in the US, but a relatively stable wage structure in Europe in the 1980s. These different trends are...

Over the last fifteen years, France has experienced a reversal of older workers' labor force participation and employment rates. Changes in health, life expectancy or education levels over the period are trend variables and thus cannot explain this “U-shaped” time profile. Pension reforms...

We analyze the way in which social security privatization reform affects labor market outcomes. We develop a model of the labor market where we assume that, as is the case in most emerging markets, a formal and an informal sectors coexist side by side. According to our model, a social security...

The extent of the demographic changes in Europe is dramatic and will deeply affect future labor, financial and goods markets. The expected strain on public budgets and especially social security has already received prominent attention, but aging poses many other economic challenges that...

This paper examines the impact of late-career investment returns and job loss on subsequent retiree well-being. Specifically, we explore whether there is a link between the income of retirees aged 70 to 79 and the stock market and labor market conditions that existed around the time of their...

The direct financial impact of the financial crisis has been to deal a heavy blow to investment-based pensions; many workers lost a substantial portion of their retirement saving. The financial sector implosion produced an economic crisis for the rest of the economy via high unemployment and...

Pensions have played a key role in the transformation of the way workers are paid in the US labor market This paper reviews and synthesizes what is known about the form and function of employer-provided pensions, and identifies areas where further information is most needed. for increasing our...

Employer-sponsored group pension plans offer an unusual window into long-term employment relationships. This is because the pension promise is documented in a set of explicit statements regarding future payment and employment agreements between workers and their employers. In this paper, we show...

We exploit the gender-specific components of large-scale labor demand shocks stemming from rising international manufacturing competition to test how shifts in the relative economic stature of young men versus young women affected marriage, fertility and children's living circumstances during...