Population ageing will be the dominant feature of the world's demographic landscape in the coming decades, raising concerns about labor productivity and about economic outcomes at both the individual, enterprise, and macro levels. The articles in this special issue of Labour Economics define and...

Previous studies report a wide range of estimates for how female labor supply responds to childcare prices. We shed new light on this question using a reform that raised the prices of public daycare. Parents respond by reducing public daycare and increasing childcare at home. Parents also reduce...

In this paper, we address the question whether family support via the income tax system is more generous in France than in Germany, as it is often claimed in the public debate. We use two micro-data sets and a micro-simulation model to compare effective average tax rates for different household...

Earlier literature has investigated the drop in household consumption upon retirement of the head of the household, the so-called "retirement consumption puzzle". Here, we expand on these studies by considering also retirement of the wife, thus distinguishing households in which the wife is a...

The many facets of retirement have been studied widely by economists. However, the effect of retirement on marriage stability has been ignored in the literature. Retirement represents a dramatic change in individual time allocation that may affect marriage stability. In particular, individuals...

Earlier studies conclude that spouses' retirement strategies are not independent from each other and that policies affecting individuals in a couple are also likely to affect the economic behaviour of their partner. In this study, we exploit retirement age legislation in France as well as a...

This literature review provides an overview of the theoretical and empirical research in several disciplines on the relation between ageing and subjective well-being, i.e., how subjective well-being evolves across the lifespan. Because of the different methodologies, data sets and samples used,...

The European Employment Strategy has set the goal of raising the retirement age of workers in the EU through a strategy of "active ageing". Yet despite some progress over the last decade, empirical data show persistent diversity across EU member states. Institutional arrangements of social and...

Angesichts des demographischen Wandels wird es immer wichtiger, dass sich Unternehmen und Erwerbstätige auf ein längeres Erwerbsleben einstellen. Eine höhere Beschäftigungsquote älterer Arbeitskräfte und ein späterer Renteneintritt erlauben die Mobilisierung von dringend benötigten...

Between 2009 and 2011, data were collected under the first wave of The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA). Over 8,500 people aged 50 and over and living in Ireland were interviewed on a wide range of topics covering socioeconomic and health issues. Our primary goals in this paper are (a)...