We study re-entry to the workforce of fully retired persons, so-called unretirement, and whether the decision to resume work depends primarily on social or economic reasons. Using Swedish register data for already retired individuals older than 55, we find unretirement to vary between 6 and 14...

We analyse the consequences of starting a wage subsidised job, marginal employment, for unemployed workers. Marginal employment is a type of wage subsidy paid to unemployed workers and they do not lose their unemployment benefits if the wage is below a certain threshold. We ask if the unemployed...

We use a rapid introduction of an unconditional cash grant (child support) in South Africa to estimate the marginal propensity to consume and earn out of a permanent change in unearned income. We find that the marginal propensity to earn is about to -0.25 for single-adult households, and...

Knowledge about how elderly workers react to changes in pension benefits is important in guiding the design of social security systems. This paper contributes to this knowledge by examining the effect of changed replacement rates on part-time retirement behaviour in Sweden. During the 1980s,...

This paper looks at welfare reforms in Italy and their effects on labour supply. I focus on social security reforms, which have taken place in the 1990s and on labour market reforms. Old age social security expenditure in Italy is high (14% of GDP) and the system has been very generous on early...

Comparing Sweden to other EU countries, labour force participation rates of older individuals and females are high. These facts are consistent with the idea that institutional design matters: access to child care, paid parental leave, and a tax system with individual rather than household income...

The modernisation of Swedish households during the twentieth century prompted a considerable productivity growth in household production, which reduced the time input for a fixed volume of routine household work by about 35 per cent 1920-1990. Much of that time was gradually transferred to the...

This paper reviews how income-support systems affect labour force participation in the UK. The UK's approach to social insurance is basic security, with modest, typically flat-rate, benefits; insurance-based benefits are relatively unimportant. Compared with the EU, the UK has high employment...

This paper exploits exogenous variation in the price of child care stemming from a major child care price reform, to estimate the effects of child care costs on parents’ labour supply. The reform introduced a cap on the price that local governments could charge parents, and lead to...