The paper studies retirement behavior of wage-earners in Belgium for the first time using rich survey data to explore retirement incentives as faced by individuals. Specifically, we use SHARE data to estimate a model à la Stock and Wise (1990). Exploring the longitudinal nature of SHARELIFE, we...

The purpose of this letter is to analyze the impact of economic integration when countries differ in their social security systems, more specifically in the degree of funding of their pensions, and in the regulation of the retirement age. Funding and mandatory early retirement are two features...

The shift-share analysis is a widely used decomposition technique in regional studies to quantify an industry-mix effect and a competitive effect on the growth of regional employment (or any other relevant variable) relative to the national average. This technique has always been subject to...

We simulate different reform scenarios of the Belgian pension system using a micro-simulation approach. Using a rich administrative dataset with extensive information on individual earnings histories, we evaluate the impact of the scenarios for the individuals as well as the system as a whole....

The quality of electricity distribution is being more and more scrutinized by regulatory authorities, with explicit reward and penalty schemes based on quality targets having been introduced in many countries. It is then of prime importance to know the cost of improving the quality for a...

This paper uses generational accounts as an instrument to analyse the fiscal long term sustainability of Belgian public finances. Age-profiles of detailed tax and expenditure categories are derived from micro data and microsimulation models, and then plugged into a long run demographic...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of economic integration when countries differ in their social security systems, more specifically in the degree of funding of their pensions, and in the flexibility in the retirement age. It then turns to the impact of ageing, namely the decline...

Recent empirical evidence shows that gross official capital transactions flow up- stream in the international financial markets due to government policy objectives and that they account for the current account surpluses observed in the last decade in the fast-growing emerging economies....

This paper provides empirical evidence on the determinants of firms’ R&D investment and innovation decisions by using an original sample of Spanish firms from all business sectors (industry and services). The sample is the result of a survey conducted in Spain in 2006-2007 and includes...

We develop a two step estimation procedure to estimate nonlinear panel data models. Our approach combines the “correlated random effect” and the “control function” approach to handel endogeneity of regressors that are correlated with both the unobserved heterogeneity as well as the...