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...

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...

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...

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 Most of the current pension laws relating to retirement age were codified decades ago, and they have become badly out of date given what we now know about longevity, about health and...

A pay-as-you-go pension scheme is associated with positive externalities of having children and providing them with human capital. In a framework with heterogeneity in productivity, and stochastic and endogenous investment in fertility and education, we discuss internalization policies...

We present a model of courtship in which the timing of marriage is affected by the cognitive dissonance between perceived norms and personal aims. We argue that as long as the family has been the main provider of social protection, marriage has been favoured by strongly felt social norms, and...

We assess quantitatively the effect of exogenous reductions in fertility on output per capita. Our simulation model allows for effects that run through schooling, the size and age structure of the population, capital accumulation, parental time input into child-rearing, and crowding of fixed...