Policy makers have often argued that an additional benefit of facilitating early retirement is that it creates employment for the young. This may happen if older and younger workers are substitutes. Nowadays policy makers’ goals are to discourage early retirement to counter the economic...

This paper examines the association between lifetime income and old age mortality risk, referred to as the income-mortality gradient, in Italy during the 1980s and 1990s. We extend the literature by estimating the income-mortality gradient using Cox proportional hazard models, where the...

We investigate how early life circumstances — childhood health and socioeconomic status (SES) — are associated with labor market outcomes over an individual's entire life cycle. A life cycle approach provides insights not only into which labor market outcomes are associated with adverse...

This paper analyzes the impact on fertility of changes in national expenditure for family allowances, maternity and parental leave benefits, and childcare subsidies. To do so, I estimate a model for the timing of births using individual-level data from 16 Western European countries supplemented...

We use probabilistic survey questions to analyze the determinants of individuals’ expected value of and the uncertainty in the retirement income replacement rate. We find that the expected replacement rate is U-shaped in age and is substantially lower for highereducated individuals....

This paper uses data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe to examine the home care received by elderly in Western Europe. Specifically, we relate the demand for home care to the health status of the elderly household members and like previous studies find that health...

This paper investigates what motivates intergenerational time and money transfers. We consider a model in which transfers may be driven not only by altruism, but also by exchange considerations. We use data from SHARE to discriminate between the two motives. We show that both if we consider...

This paper examines the influence of both trust and sociability on stock market participation and their implications for international differences in stockholding. Using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe supplemented with information on regional trust from the World...

This paper examines whether maternity leave policies have a causal effect on women's mental health in old age. We link data for women aged 50 and above from eight countries in the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) to data on maternity leave legislation from 1960 to 2010....

Debt-induced crises, including the subprime, are usually attributed exclusively to supply-side factors. We examine the role of social influences on debt culture, emanating from perceived average income of peers. Utilizing unique information from a household survey representative of the Dutch...