In Belgium, a series of social security reforms have been implemented over the years with the overarching goal of increasing the labor force participation through better work incentives. Using individual-level administrative data, the paper studies the impact of those incentive-based reforms on...

We develop and estimate a life-cycle consumption savings model in which observed genetic variation is allowed to affect wealth accumulation through several distinct channels. We focus on genetic markers that predict educational attainment, aggregated into a predictive index called a polygenic...

This paper presents a new approach to measuring the intergenerational transmission of well-being and a novel perspective on which measures and what age ranges to use to estimate intergenerational social mobility. We select the measures and the age ranges that best predict important human capital...

We provide new evidence that cash transfers following the birth of a first child can have large and long-lasting effects on that child's outcomes. We take advantage of the January 1 birthdate cutoff for U.S. child-related tax benefits, which results in families of otherwise similar children...

This paper studies the mechanisms and the extent to which parental wage risk passes through to children's skill development. Through a quantitative dynamic labor supply model in which two parents choose whether to work short or long hours or not work at all, time spent with children, and...

More than ten percent of Americans with recent work experience say they will continue social distancing after the COVID-19 pandemic ends, and another 45 percent will do so in limited ways. We uncover this Long Social Distancing phenomenon in our monthly Survey of Working Arrangements and...

We estimate the impact of public pension systems on labor supply far from the normal retirement age by exploiting Poland's switch from a Defined Benefit to a Notional Defined Contribution scheme for men born after 1948. Using the universe of taxpayers and this sharp cohort-based discontinuity in...

Throughout the world, the great popularity of programs to protect those who may fall into poverty stands in contrast with the weakness of policies aimed at helping individuals who are already poor to overcome long-term poverty. In the paper, an OLG model with persistent poverty and limited...

A critical question for Social Security policy is how program incentives affect retirement behavior. We use the wealth of new data available through the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) to examine the impact of Social Security incentives on male retirement. We implement forward-looking models...

The Social Security earnings test reduces benefits at a 33-50% rate once earnings pass a threshold amount - among the highest marginal tax rates in the economy. Previous research dismissed the importance of the earnings test but failed to take advantage of three changes in the earnings test...