Fertility has long been declining in industrialised countries and the existence of public pension systems is considered as one of the causes. This paper is the first to provide detailed evidence based on historical data on the mechanism by which a public pension system depresses fertility. Our...

Motherhood and parental leave interrupt employment relationships, likely imposing costs on firms. We document that mothers who are difficult to replace internally take shorter leave and that their firms hire replacements more often. Introducing more generous parental leave benefits erases the...

In the early 2000s, eight Norwegian energy producing municipalities sold up to ten years of future electricity earnings and let two brokers from Terra Securities make investments on their behalf. In the wake of the 2007 credit crash the municipalities lost up to 80 percent of their assets. This...

The increased demand for a more equal parental sharing of the responsibilities for children has led many countries to reconstruct their parental leave systems so to provide stronger incentives for fathers to participate in childcare. Father's quotas are becoming widely spread across Europe. This...

A large body of empirical evidence documents the gender variation in labour market outcomes. A major factor that contributes to persistent gender gaps in labour market performance is women’s traditional role in the household. Child-related absences from work imply that women accumulate less...

Analyzing a homogenous household setting with endogenous fertility and endogenous labor supply, we demonstrate that moving from joint taxation to individual taxation and adapting child benefits so as to keep fertility constant entails a Pareto improvement. The change is associated with an...

What is the optimal retirement age? This paper looks at the optimal retirement age from various perspectives. Most of the current pension laws relating to retirement age were codified decades ago, and they have become badly out of date given what we now know about longevity, about health and...

This article reviews the distribution of income and wealth in the US from three basic perspectives that tend to be otherwise overlooked if the subject is framed primarily on the basis of the gross statistics: a) quantity and quality of work effort; b) quantity and quality of capital...

Analyzing a homogenous household setting with endogenous fertility and endogenous labor supply, we demonstrate that moving from joint taxation to individual taxation and adapting child benefits so as to keep fertility constant entails a Pareto improvement. The change is associated with an...

Several countries, including Australia, have a means-tested public age pension. Means testing the age pension can reduce the overall fiscal burden relative to a universal pension, but can also distort households’ incentives to work and save. Policymakers can influence the sizes of these...