Voluntary’ and ‘Involuntary’ Early Retirement: An International Analysis Recent literature makes a distinction between 'voluntary' and 'involuntary' early retirement, where 'involuntary' early retirement results from employment constraints rather than from a preference for leisure relative to work. This paper analyzes 'voluntary' and 'involuntary' early retirement based on international microda...

Why Does Intermarriage Increase Immigrant Employment? The Role of Networks Social networks are commonly understood to play a large role in the labor market success of immigrants. Using 2000 U.S. Census data, this paper examines whether access to native networks, as measured by marriage to a native, increases the probability of immigrant employment. We start by confirming in both least squares a...

We develop a model to analyze the implications of "ring costs on incentives for R&D and international specialization. The key idea is that countries with a rigid labor market will tend to produce relatively secure goods, at a late stage of their product life cycle. Consequently, their researchers tend to specialize in &secondary innovation' which improves existing products, rather than &primary...

Using data from the German SOEP, this paper analyses whether there have been (a) any significant changes in poverty rates and poverty intensities before and after the Hartz IV reforms and (b) whether there have been observable changes in the effect of employment in reducing the threat or intensity of poverty. Using multivariate analyses we can find no evidence of increases in poverty rates comp...

This paper evaluates the extent of inter-industry and inter-regional wage spillovers across the UK. A large literature exists suggesting that wages elsewhere affect wage determination and levels of satisfaction, but this paper extends the analysis of wage determination to examine the effects of inward investment in the process. Thus far the specific effect of foreign wages on domestic wage dete...

Spousal and Survivor Benefits in Option Value Models of Retirement: An Application to Belgium1 We study retirement incentives with augmented option value model à la Stock and Wise (1990). We propose methodological extensions to better reflect the respective incentives faced by singles and couples. Our results show that a more comprehensive modelling of couples’ incentives leads to very differen...

Cohort Size and Youth Employment Outcomes This paper utilizes a cross-country panel of 83 developing countries to examine how changes in cohort size are correlated with subsequent employment outcomes for workers at different ages. The results depend on countries’ level of development. In low-income countries, young adults that are born into smaller cohorts are less likely to work, but school at...

This paper examines the importance of labor market dropouts and selection bias in assessing black-white wage convergence by introducing a simple method of imputing wages to nonworkers. When nonworkers are included in the calculations, it is found that real wages of prime age black males increased less than 2 percent over the 1969-96 period in contrast to 9 percent wage growth observed among wor...

Over the past several decades, the issue of overeducation has attracted the attention of economists from many countries partly because overeducation appeared to be common and persistent. And yet, cognitive and noncognitive skills have not been systematically incorporated in the literature in spite of their importance in labor market outcomes. Using the National Education Longitudinal Study, thi...