This paper shows that the results of Bucci (2003) depend criti- cally on the assumption that there are no difference between the intermediate goods share in final output, the returns of specialization and the degree of market power of monopolistic competitors. In this paper, we disentangle the...

The Czech Republic is no longer an employment haven, the site of what had been declared as an “unemployment miracle.” What happened? In this paper, the authors gather various statistical and sociological data on employment and unemployment trends, wage development, and workers’ opinions...

The authors formulate a stylized structural model of health, wealth accumulation and retirement decisions building on the human capital framework of health provided by Grossman. They explicitly assume a functional form of the utility function and carefully account for initial conditions, which...

Recent growth theories have utilized the Ben-Porath (1967) mechanism according to which prolonging the period in which individuals may receive returns on their investment spurs investment in human capital and cause growth. An important, though sometime implicit implication of these models is...

The Ben-Porath (1967) mechanism suggests that prolonging the period during which individuals may receive returns on their investment spurs investment in human capital and causes growth. An important, albeit implicit implication of this mechanism is that the total labour input over a lifetime...

The demographic transition in industrialized countries poses challenges to the pension system which is essentially organized according to the pay-as-you-go principle in most countries. This paper aims at analyzing two proposals for pension reform in a theoretical model that endogenously explains...

This paper extends the basic model of human capital with social security to take into account the worker's possibility to benefit from a process of learning by doing and shows that the direct relationship between time of entry and exit of labor force, that was verified in that basic model, is no...

This paper uses longitudinal test data to analyze the relation between retirement and cognitive development. Controlling for individual fixed effects and lagged cognition, we find that retirees face greater declines in information processing speed than those who remain employed. However,...

Technological progress affects early retirement in two opposing ways. On the one hand, it increases real wages and thus produces an incentive to postpone retirement. On the other hand, it erodes workers' skills, making early retirement more likely. Using the Health and Retirement Study surveys,...

The baby-boom and subsequent baby-bust have shaped much of the history of the second half of the 20th century; yet it is still largely unclear what caused them. This paper presents a new unified explanation of the fertility Boom-Bust that links the latter to the Great Depression and the...