The paper studies the power of educational investments in relation to transfers for fostering lifetime income and for reducing income inequality in Germany. The welfare analysis is based on a model of age-dependent human capital accumulation, featuring dynamic complementarities in skill...

A key figure which can be applied to measuring inter-generational imbalances involved in existing public pension schemes is given by the implicit tax that is levied on each generation s life-time income through participation in these systems. The implicit tax arises from the fact that, quite...

Both the United States and Australia have multi-pillar retirement systems that include a public component and a private component. Increasingly, the private component consists of a defined contribution plan. At the outset, this paper provides an overview of the retirement systems of the U.S. and...

In this paper, we explore the underlying explanations for the under financing of the U.S. Social Security pension system that has persisted since the late 1980s despite repeated calls for reform by the program's trustees and various advisory groups. Both micro and macro estimates of the cost...

Employer-sponsored pensions, the second tier of the United States retirement system, ought to be a major source of lifetime income in retirement for many, if not most, Americans. However, while employer-sponsored pensions are mandatory or quasimandatory in many countries, they are voluntary in...

This paper experimentally examines whether looking at other peopleś pricing decisions is a type of heuristic - a decisionmaking rule - that people use even when it is not applicable, as in the case of clearly private value goods. We find evidence that this indeed is the case - an individualś...

High- and low-wage occupations are expanding rapidly relative to middle-wage occupations in both the U.S. and the E.U. We study the reallocation of workers from middle-skill occupations towards the tails of the occupational skill distribution by analyzing changes in age structure within and...

This paper explores the potential externality of welfare payments under the Unemployment Insurance (UI) program during times of high job destruction rates and unemployment rates on the spread and mortality of COVID-19. Using data for all US counties over the year 2020 and applying a...

The U.S. population has become increasingly concentrated in large metropolitan areas. However, there are striking differences in between the performances of big cities: some of them have been very successful and have been able to pull away from the rest, while others have stagnated or even...

Job mobility is essential for a well-functioning market economy and for individual workers to boost their wages. This paper provides a re-assessment of job mobility in the United States during 2000-2018, based on a novel administrative data source covering almost all workers and job flows....