China is on the eve of a demographic shift that will have profound consequences on its economic and social landscape. Within a few years the working age population will reach a historical peak, and then begin a precipitous decline. This fact, along with anecdotes of rapidly rising migrant wages...

We propose a dynamic production function of population health and mortality from birth onwards. Our parsimonious model provides an excellent fit for the mortality and survival curves for both primate and human populations since 1816. The model sheds light on the dynamics behind many phenomena...

The paper introduces 'system priors', their use in Bayesian analysis of econometric time series, and provides a simple and illustrative application. System priors were devised by Andrle and Benes (2013) as a tool to incorporate prior knowledge into an economic model. Unlike priors about...

This paper seeks to illuminate the uncertainty in official GDP per capita measuresusing auxiliary data. Using satellite-recorded nighttime lights as an additional measurementof true GDP per capita, we provide a statistical framework, in which the error inofficial GDP per capita may depend on the...

The paper explores a different, supplementary way to assess and manage a particular type of banking crises, those arising from a rise of nonperforming loans to the corporate sector. It relies on a 'national wealth approach,' focusing on the distribution of net wealth among economic sectors and...

This paper explores the impact of fiscal decentralization on the efficiency of public service delivery. It uses a stochastic frontier method to estimate time-varying efficiency coefficients and analyzes the impact of fiscal decentralization on those efficiency coefficients. The findings indicate...

What are the implications of the needed climate transition for the potential reallocation of the U.S. labor force? This paper dissects green and polluting jobs in the United States across local labor markets, industries and at the household-level. We find that geography alone is not a major...

In recent decades, population has been aging fast in Brazil while old age pensions and health related spending have increased. As the population ages, the spending trend threaten to reach unsustainable levels absent reforms. Increasing the retirement age is key, but by itself will not provide...

How much of an internal rate of return would a sustainable pay-as-you-go pension system offer current and future generations equally? The answer is the sum of the Long-Run Biological Interest Rates (LBIR), the real-world equivalent of Samuelson's (1958) biological interest rate, and future...

Gains in labor force participation rates in Chile have slowed in recent years. We examine their determinants using a cohort-model analysis. Allowing for both age- and cohort-specific effects in the context of a seemingly unrelated regression equations (SURE) approach, we find that age factors...