We investigate whether a worker’s sickness absence is affected by her colleagues’ absences from the workplace. The analysis is based on unique matched employer-employee data for Norwegian schoolteachers for the period 2001 to 2006 with information on different types of absences and multiple...

This paper carries out a critical reappraisal of the two contending theories purporting to explain long-run government spending: Wagner’s Law and different variants of the ratchet effect. We analyze data spanning from the early 19th century until the present day in Sweden and the United...

This paper analyzes the quantitative role of idiosyncratic uncertainty in an economy in which rational agents vote on hypothetical social security reforms. We construct an Overlapping Generations economy in which individuals face idiosuncratic risk with respect to their labor productivity and...

We examine the impact of a policy reform that gave employees in a municipality extended rights to self-declare sickness absence. To identify the effect of bypassing the physician as an absence certifier we contrast the development of absence in the reform municipality with absence in similar...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the effect of the recent Social Security reform on public retirement benefits. The main measures af- fecting the calculation of pensions are: 1) extension of the retirement age from 65 to 67 years, 2) changes in covered earnings of the retirement pension, 3)...

Human capital and, therefore, education have an impact on the societys future welfare. In this paper we study the connection between the voters support to public education and the retirement concerns. We show that voters anticipate the positive effect of education on future pensions. The support...

This paper uses a overlapping generation general equilibrium model to study a reform of the social security system, going from an unfunded to a funded system. We also analyze the effects of this reform on the incentives of young generations to acquire skills. the main objective is to evaluate...

This paper studies the output effects, transition costs and the change in pension benefits derived from the substitution of the current unfunded pension system by a fully funded pension system financed through mandatory savings. These effects are estimated by using reduced versions of the...

The paper examines the intergenerational impact of the Spanish public pension system after the 1997 Pension Reform Act. Working within a Generational Accounting framework, we find that maintaining the new legal setting could leave future generations with liabilities as high as 176 percent of...

In many developing and transitional countries, inter-household transfers in general and gifts in particular are sizable and very important. We use unique Romanian data that enables us, contrary to most previous studies, to isolate pure gifts from other kinds of private transfers and to study...