Many countries around the world have large public pension programs with signif-icant cross-cohort redistribution. This paper provides a rationale for such programsin a lifecycle framework with search and matching frictions in the labor market. Inthe model, public pension programs alter the age...

Many countries around the world have large public pension programs. Traditionally, these programshave been used to induce retirement by the elderly in order to free up jobs for the young andto redistribute income across generations. This paper provides an efficiency rationale for the...

Almost half the women in work in the UK work part-time, but views conflict: does this support awoman’s career or is it a dead-end trap?Cohort data on labour market involvement to age 42 show highly varied pathways throughfull/part-time/non-employment. Econometric estimation confirms that...

We study both the various consequences and the incentives of outsourcing. We argue thatthe wage elasticity of labour demand is increasing as a function of the share of outsourcing,which is importantly a result consistent with existing empirical research...

A popular view about social security, dating back to its early days of inception, is that it is a means for young, unemployed workers to "purchase" jobs from older, employed workers. The question we ask is: Can social security, by encouraging retirement and hence creating job vacancies for the...

Recent empirical evidence has found that employment services and small-businessassistance programmes are often successful at getting the unemployed back to work. Oneimportant concern of policy makers is to decide which of these two programmes is moreeffective and for whom...