Using a novel dataset from the 2006 Portuguese Labor Force Survey this paper examinesthe impact of a voluntary reduction in hours of work, before retirement, on the moment of exitfrom the labor force. If, as often suggested, flexibility in hours of work is a useful measure topostpone retirement,...

We use firm closure data from social security records for Austria 1978-1998 to investigate theeffect of age on employment prospects. We rely on exact matching to compare workersdisplaced due to firm closure with similar non-displaced workers. We then use a differencein-difference strategy to...

Demographic crisis and imprudent commitments have induced a crisis in publicpension programmes in OECD countries. Will present and prospective cutbacks leadto greater private saving, either in the form of private pension provision or in otherforms of saving? The paper surveys existing evidence,...

Public pension programmes in many OECD countries are in difficulties. With anageing population, and declining participation of working age men in paid work,existing pension arrangements are far too costly in many countries, both now and inthe future. This paper examines the evidence as to...

The Matching Distribution converges to a Poisson Distribution with ë = 1 as the parameter n converges to infinity. A generalization of the Matching Distribution is proposed. The properties of this Generalized Matching Distribution (GMD) turn out to be analogical to the case with ë = 1.

We examine the impact of performance groups on the estimation of therelative importance of ¯rm, industry and other e®ects on corporate performance.Performance groups comprise ¯rms from the same industry with asimilar performance over a longer period of time. We present a statisticalmethod...

In this paper we present a new approach to incorporate default dependency in intensity-based default risk models. The model uses an arbitrary default dependency structure which is specified by the Copula of the times of default, this is combined with individual intensity-based models for the...