The substantial rise in the proportion of elderly (65+) people in the British population over the last hundred years has been matched by a dramatic fall in labour-force participation rates among the elderly. Some commentators see the reduction in work opportunities for the eldery and their...

This paper reviews evidence that life-cycle saving became the norm in nineteenth-century America, with a consequent fall in fertility and rise in the rate of capital formation, and considers whether a similar transition to life-cycle saving can be observed in nineteenth-century Britain. Although...

This paper evaluates the relative impact of range of health, economic and structural factors on the employment experience of older male workers in Britain in the 30 years since 1951. It is based on a cross sectional analysis of data on age of workforce in 34 industrial sectors drawn from the...

The aging of the populations of all developed nations over the next 40 years will have an important impact on welfare expenditure and labor supply. This paper uses aggregate data from IMF and OECD studies to examine the way in which income support for the elderly and the labor supply of older...

This paper examines the viewpoint that the dependency of elderly people in modern Britain has been increased by state action and social change. It argues that ideas of "structured dependency" are based upon theoretical premises which promote a one-sided reading of the evidence. An analysis of...

This paper provides some new evidence on the behavior of cross-country growth rates. We reject the linear model commonly used to study cross-country growth behavior in favor of a multiple regime alternative in which different economies obey different linear models when grouped according to...

Structural vector autoregressive (VAR) models were introduced in 1980 as an alternative to traditional large-scale macroeconometric models when the theoretical and empirical support for these models became increasingly doubtful. Initial applications of the structural VAR methodology often were...

The hosting and bidding for the Olympic Games is a natural experiment to test for anticipation effects in macroeconomics. We examine these effects using panel data for 184 countries during the period 1950-2006. We find that hosting the Games generates positive investment, consumption, and output...

Does fiscal consolidation lead to social unrest? Using cross-country evidence for the period 1919 to 2008, we examine the extent to which societies become unstable after budget cuts. The results show a clear correlation between fiscal retrenchment and instability. We test if the relationship...