The aim of this paper is to provide a political-economic explanation of the wide spread adoption of generous early retirement. We suggest that the political support for generous early retirement provisions relies on: (i) the existence of an initial, significant group of redundant elderly workers...

Why do people have kids in developed societies? We propose an empirical test of two alternative theories - children as "consumptionʺ vs. "investmentʺ good. We use as a natural experiment the Italian pension reforms of the 90s that introduced a clear discontinuity in the treatment across...

Is electoral competition good for political selection? To address this issue, we introduce a theoretical model in which ideological parties select candidates between party loyalists and experts, and allocate them into the electoral districts. Non-ideological voters, who care about national and...