In several OECD countries age-targeted wage subsidies have been introduced to increase the employment of older workers, but evidence on their effectiveness is scarce. This paper examines the effects of a permanent wage cost subsidy in Belgium on the employment rate, working time and hourly wage....

We study the impact of graduating in a recession in Flanders (Belgium), i.e. in a rigid labor market. In the presence of a high minimum wage, a typical recession hardly influences the hourly wage of low educated men, but reduces working time and earnings by about 4.5% up to twelve years after...

Beyond natural sterility, there are two main types of childlessness: one driven by poverty and another by the high opportunity cost to child-rearing. We argue that taking childlessness and its causes into account matters for assessing the impact of development policies on fertility. We measure...

Agents can learn from financial markets to predict macroeconomic outcomes and learning dynamics can feed back into both the macroeconomy and financial markets. This paper builds on the adaptive learning (AL) model of Slobodyan andWouters (2012b) by introducing the term structure of interest...

This paper studies the impact of trade liberalization on labor market outcomes. First, we find that bilateral trade liberalization does not affect exports towards third countries. To accommodate this novel result, we deviate from existing literature and rely on a three-country monopolistic...

This paper investigates whether the early experience of non-employment has a causal impact on workers' subsequent career. The analysis is based on a sample of low educated youth graduating between 1994 and 2002 in Flanders (Belgium), i.e. a rigid labour market. To correct for selective incidence...

Through indirect inference, we investigate the extent to which religions’supposed pronatalism is detrimental to growth via the fertility/education channel. Using censuses from South-East Asia, we first estimate an empirical model of fertility and show that having a religious affiliation...

L'Indice de richesse inclusive est issu de la théorie économique standard de la soutenabilité, entendue comme préservation d'une somme pondérée de capitaux censés contribuer au bien-être intergénérationnel. Cet indicateur semble voué à occuper une place importante dans la poursuite...

This paper investigates the problem of an "optimum population" concerning age structures in a 3-period OLG-model with endogenous fertility and longevity. The first-best solution for a number-dampened total social welfare function, including Millian and Benthamite utilitarianism as two extreme...

This paper shows that differences in fertility across European countries mainly emerge in the transition from the first to the second child and that childcare services enabling women to work are an important determinant for this transition to occur. The theoretical framework proposed accounts...