This volume presents the fourth phase of the project. An analysis and country-by-country comparison of the effects of social security incentives on retirement behavior in Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the UK, and the United States.

"Taking an empirical economics perspective, this volume assesses the causal impacts of disadvantage on youth outcomes and how policy interventions can alleviate those impacts. Each chapter develops a framework to describe the relationship between youth disadvantages and later life outcomes,...

The substantial decline in the cost of wind and solar generation over recent decades has significantly altered the energy landscape. With these technologies becoming economically viable, even without stringent decarbonization policies, the role of interregional transmission has become...

This paper considers the "DeFi intermediation chain"--the market structure that underlies the creation and distribution of ETH, the native cryptocurrency of Ethereum--to examine how information asymmetry shapes intermediation rents. We argue that using proof-of-stake blockchain technology in...

This paper investigates the causal effect of job training on wage rates in the presence of firm heterogeneity. When training affects worker sorting to firms, sample selection is no longer binary but is "multilayered". This paper extends the canonical Heckman (1979) sample selection model - which...

We study habitual brand loyalty, one of the earliest empirically-studied forms of switching costs and a classic source of structural state-dependence in consumer demand. Auxiliary instruments and economically-motivated restrictions can tighten nonparametric bounds on the extent of brand loyalty...

All of asset-pricing theory currently stems from one key assumption: price equals expected discounted payoff. And much of what we think we know about discount rates comes from studying a particular kind of expected payoff: the earnings forecasts in analyst reports. Researchers typically access...

How reliable are public debt statistics? This paper quantifies the magnitude, characteristics, and timing of hidden debt by tracking ex post data revisions across a comprehensive new database of more than 50 vintages of World Bank debt statistics. In a sample of debt data covering 146 countries...