This paper considers the issue of actuarial fairness of the new Italian public pension system in view of the recent trends in old-age mortality and the survival differences by gender, birth cohort and region of residence.3 Section 2 reviews the secular trends in elderly mortality in Italy,...

Mean heights are often used to measure living standards for times and places in which other economic indicators are not available. We propose a novel approach to modeling the distribution of heights, which does not rely on common but often-unwarranted assumptions such as normality. We construct...

The European Community Household Panel (ECHP) is a standardized multi-purpose annual longitudinal survey carried out at the level of the European Union. It is centrally designed and coordinated by the Statistical Office of the European Communities (Eurostat), and covers demographics, labor force...

This paper investigates the local robustness properties of a general class of multidimensional tests based on <italic>M</italic>-estimators. These tests are shown to inherit the efficiency and robustness properties of the estimators on which they are based. In particular, it is shown that small perturbations of...

We investigate the causal effect of retirement on health and cognitive abilities by exploiting the variation between and within European countries in old age retirement rules. We show negative and significant effect of retirement on both health and cognitive abilities. We also show evidence of...

A relevant question for the organization of large scale research assessments is whether bibliometric evaluation and informed peer review where reviewers know where the work was published, yield similar results. It would suggest, for instance, that less costly bibliometric evaluation might - at...

Recent literature on panel data emphasizes the importance of accounting for time-varying unobservable individual effects, which may stem from either omitted individual characteristics or macro-level shocks that affect each individual unit differently. In this paper, we propose a simple...