the retirement behaviour of the self employed in britain we analyze the retirement behaviour of older self employed workers using a life cycle framework and a multinomial logit model of dynamic employment and retirement choices using data from the two wave retirement survey we find that greater actual or potential earnings decrease the probability of retirement among the self employed in contrast to employees none of gender health or family circumstances appear to affect self employed retirement decisions the dynamic analysis reveals that relatively few employees and virtually no retirees switch into self employment in later life the switches that do occur are motivated less by attempts to use self employment as a bridge job or stepping stone to full retirement than by self employment being a last resort for less affluent workers with job histories of weak attachment to the labour market we compare self employed and employee retirement behaviour and discuss the policy implications of our results

the quality effect does financial liberalization improve the allocation of capital abstract we document evidence of a quality effect of financial liberalization on allocative efficiency as measured by dispersion in tobin s q across firms we predict that financial liberalization by equalizing access to credit is associated with reduced variation in expected marginal returns we test this prediction using a new financial liberalization index and firm level data for five emerging markets india jordan korea malaysia and thailand we find robust evidence that financial liberalization rather than financial deepening is associated with improved allocative efficiency

income and outcomes a structural model of intrahousehold allocation there is evidence from several sources that one cannot treat many person households as a single decision maker if this is the case then factors such as the relative incomes of the household members may affect the final allocation decisions made by the household we develop a method of identifying how incomes affect outcomes given conventional family expenditure data the basic assumption we make is that household decision processes lead to efficient outcomes we apply our method to a sample of canadian couples with no children we find that the final allocations of expenditures on each partner depend significantly on their relative incomes and ages and on the level of lifetime wealth

exploring the nexus between financial openness and informational efficiency does the quality of institution matter this article examines the empirical link between financial openness and informational efficiency of stock markets in 27 emerging markets improving on earlier papers this study has used world bank s worldwide governance indicators wgi as the proxy of institutional development in dynamic panel data models estimated by generalized method of moments gmm our results show first financial liberalization by itself has no impact on enhancing efficiency of stock market second for countries with high level of institutional development the interaction of trade openness and financial openness become significant third for the same group of countries interaction effect of financial liberalization and institutional development leads to more efficiency in stock market hence our finding demonstrates the utmost importance of institutional development and its role on liberalization our results conclude that institutional development and trade openness are pre requisites for a country to benefit from financi

job exit behavior of older men a dynamic programming model of job exit behavior and retirement is constructed and estimated using the method of simulated moments the model and estimation method allow for both unobserved individual effects and unobserved job specific match effects the model is estimated using two different assumptions about individual discount factors first a static model with the discount factor equal to zero is estimated then a dynamic model with the discount factor equal to 95 is estimated in both models it is found that bad health age and lack of education increase the probability of retirement the dynamic model performs better than the static model and has different implications for retirement behavior the job specific effects are an important source of unobserved heterogeneity copyright 1991 by the econometric society

labor force dynamics of older married couples this article analyzes the dynamics of joint labor force behavior of older couples in the united states using the retirement history survey rhs i analyze the determinants of joint retirement and the effect of one spouse s labor force status on the labor force transitions of the other spouse the results reveal strong associations between the labor force transition probabilities of one spouse and the labor force status of the other spouse these result from structural differences in exit and entry behavior by the spouse s status several lagged endogenous variables have substantial effects on behavior even after controlling for unobserved heterogeneity

research and development and the schumpeterian hypothesis alternate approach there have been numerous empirical studies investigating the relationship between firm size and inventive activity since schumpeter first argued that the large scale enterprise has come to be the most powerful engine of economic progress 24 106 the important policy issue is whether large firm size is associated with greater innovative output but measuring innovative output is very difficult consequently many empirical studies have focused on the relationship between firm size and some measure of innovative inputs and argue that inferences can be made concerning innovative output and firm size as long as the production of innovations is characterized by nondecreasing returns to scale 2 fisher and temin 4 contend that the empirical tests relating innovative inputs and firm size are inappropriate for even if the production of innovation is characterized by increasing returns to scale a positive and increasing relationship between r d employment and firm size is neither necessary nor sufficient for there to be an increasing and positive relationship between innovative output and firm size 3 the fisher and temin results are controversial in review articles on innovation and monopoly power markham 16 states he does not accept the conclusions of fisher and temin while kamien and schwartz 10 mention fisher and temin but discuss the empirical literature without further reference to their

public pension programmes and the retirement of married couples in denmark in this paper we study the economic determinants of the joint retirement process of married couples we propose a tractable dynamic discrete choice model for retirement decisions which allows for non trivial saving behaviour we estimate the model on a 1 sample of danish couples of potential retirement age drawn from a population based administrative register the introduction and subsequent reforms of a publicly financed early retirement programme provide us with variation in the data to insure identification of the parameters of interest the elasticities of participation retirement with respect to income flows our estimates imply a significant asymmetry in the sensitivity of retirement behaviour of men and women with respect to variation in their own or their spouse s income flows

job displacement and the transitions to re employment and early retirement for non employed older workers abstract despite the relatively higher frequency of job displacement among older workers in europe little is known about its effect on the work retirement decision employing individual data from the european community household panel for a number of countries with differences in their institutional environments the effect of job displacement for non employed workers is identified separately for the transitions into re employment and retirement the findings suggest that in countries with relatively more generous unemployment insurance provisions for the older unemployed which offer a pathway to early retirement older displaced workers exhibit lower re employment and higher retirement rates compared to the non displaced these results are robust to dynamic selection due to unobserved heterogeneity and to the endogeneity of displacement

don t look down the consequences of job loss in a flexible labour market we estimate the earnings hours and income effects of job loss for a representative sample of uk workers from 1991 2007 we follow workers before and after job loss regardless of their labour market state and we match displaced workers with similar non displaced workers this provides a more comprehensive picture of the effect of job loss in the uk than previously available job loss causes a long run reduction in income which is mainly due to reductions in monthly pay rather than in employment propensity income from other labour market states and from welfare payments does little to compensate for income losses this lack of a safety net means that job loss in the uk has a similar impact to job loss in the us

are spousal labor supplies substitutes evidence from the workweek reduction policy in china abstract we estimate the effects of spousal labor supply on individuals labor supply by using the implementation of china s 1994 1995 workweek reduction policy as a natural experiment we find that a decrease in the labor supply of wives significantly increased that of husbands but a decrease in the labor supply of husbands had an insignificantly negative effect on that of their wives furthermore a decrease in the labor supply of one spouse reduced the amount of time spent on housework by the other one our findings on the negative relationship between spousal labor supplies differ from those derived from data from developed countries we find evidence that different income levels may be the underlying reason

worktime regulations and spousal labor supply we study interdependencies in spousal labor supply by exploiting the design of the french workweek reduction which introduced exogenous variation in one s spouse s labor supply at constant earnings treated employees work on average two hours less per week husbands of treated women respond by reducing their labor supply by about half an hour consistent with substantial leisure complementarity and specifically cut the non usual component of their workweek leaving usual hours unchanged women s response to their husband s treatment is instead weak and rarely statistically significant possibly due to heavier constraints in the organization of their workweek

health insurance and retirement of married couples summary most health insurance in the usa is provided by employers until eligibility for public health insurance medicare begins at age 65 retiring before 65 exposes workers who lack retiree health insurance coverage to the risk of catastrophic medical expenditure we solve and estimate a dynamic model of the employment behavior of older married couples that includes risky medical expenditure and health insurance parameter estimates imply that the risk reducing feature of health insurance can account for about half of the observed association between retiree health insurance and employment for married men but can account for only one tenth of the much larger observed association for married women policy simulations imply very small effects on employment of changing the age of eligibility for medicare from 65 to 67 copyright 2006 john wiley sons ltd

the propensity to patent abstract this paper analyzes the relationship between 1974 rd among the exceptions the tendency was toward diminishing returns variables measuring overseas sales federal r d support diversification scope of invention use and invention type had only modest explanatory power there was no significant evidence of disproportionate patent accumulation in the more highly concentrated industries

private investor participation and commercialization rates for government sponsored research and development would a prediction market improve the performance of the sbir programme an objective of the us small business innovation research sbir programme is the private sector commercialization of funded rd our analysis of department of defense dod phase ii awards suggests that the estimated probability of commercialization is only 0 47 we investigate econometrically whether outside private investors have useful information about proposed sbir projects prospects for commercialization our findings suggest that they do thereby providing support for the possibility that a prediction market could improve the performance of the sbir programme

earnings losses of displaced workers revisited recent literature reviews conclude that job displacement results in sustained earnings losses bruce c fallick 1996 lori g kletzer 1998 and that estimates of the size of those reductions vary with the type of data used in the analysis the industry within which displacement occurs and business cycle conditions the largest estimated losses were obtained using administrative data from pennsylvania during the 1970s and 1980s louis s jacobson robert j lalonde and daniel g sullivan 1993a the data covered a period of high unemployment in a heavily indus trialized state characterized by disproportionate job losses in manufacturing thus the ability to generalize those results to more favorable economic times and states with a greater reliance on service sector employment has been questioned to address these issues administrative data are used to similarly examine the impact of job displacement on earnings losses of workers in connecticut from 1993 to 2004 the work of jacobson lalonde and sullivan jls also provided important methodologi cal advancement by adapting analytical techniques developed for program evaluation james j heckman and v joseph hotz 1989 to the context of job displacement the same techniques fixed effects and time trend estimators as those used in the original jls publication are initially employed here then the methods are extended to include matching estimators developed since their publication both nearest neighbor estimators of average treatment on the treated att and differenced average treatment on the treated datt are adapted to the context of this study heckman hidehiko ichimura and petra todd 1997 heckman et al 1998 and rajeev h dehejia and sadek wahba 1999 2002 the results presented here for connecticut differ in some ways from those found in the work of jls using data from pennsylvania in the period immediately following job loss regardless of the technique employed earnings reductions for workers displaced through mass layoff range from 32 percent to 33 percent jls reported immediate losses of more than 40 percent six years later using the same estimators as jls earnings reductions in connecticut range from 13 percent to 15 percent they report sustained losses in pennsylvania of 25 percent the smaller long term impacts in connecticut demonstrate that under more ordinary economic times esti mated losses from administrative data lie within the range observed using other data sources this finding resolves a long standing conflict among the results of high quality studies that have used differing data sources to study earnings reductions following job loss 1 using two different matching estimators earnings losses six years after mass layoff are 12 percent the matching estimators compare those who experienced mass layoff to compari sons with the same ex ante probability of the event these smaller losses are consistent with the

an evaluation of federal policy instruments to stimulate basic research in industry a model of the resource allocation behavior of a group of firms demonstrates that unaided industry allocation to basic inappropriable research is suboptimal furthermore provision of seed money is generally counterproductive while the provision of a matching subsidy is not very cost efficient in increasing the allocation innovative policy alternatives are proposed

determinants of innovation the study examines how firm size market structure profitability and growth influence innovative activity in small to medium sized australian manufacturing businesses using the recently released confidentialised unit record file drawn from the business longitudinal survey of the australian bureau of statistics regression analysis is conducted to determine the factors that effect subsequent innovative activity for the full sample of businesses as well as for sub samples of firms from high and low technological opportunity industries most variables including size r d intensity market structure and trade shares are found to be conducive to further innovative activity for the full sample and for high tech firms for low tech industries fewer variables are significant

services outsourcing and innovation an empirical investigation we provide a comprehensive empirical analysis of the links between international services outsourcing domestic outsourcing profits and innovation using plant level data we find a positive effect of international outsourcing of services on innovative activity at the plant level such a positive effect can also be observed for domestic outsourcing of services but the magnitude is smaller this makes intuitive sense as international outsourcing allows more scope for exploiting international factor price differentials therefore giving the establishment higher profits and more scope to restructure production activities towards innovation we also find that international outsourcing has a positive effect on profitability as predicted by theory while this is not true for domestic sourcing the results are robust to various specifications and an instrumental variables analysis

the effect of a wife s retirement on her husband s mental health this article examines the effect of wives retirement on their husband s mental health in australia by exploiting the exogenous variations in women s retirement induced by the age pension qualifyi

tax credits labour participation and home production in the netherlands we set up a dynamic reduced form model of labour market participation for women who balance career and motherhood the model accounts for the occurrence of future child birth and early retirement

part time work and the hiring of older workers this research uses german establishment data to examine the relationship between back loading compensation the hiring of older workers and their part time status we confirm that establishments that defer compensation are less likely to hire older workers we demonstrate for the first time that establishments that defer compensation are more likely to limit older workers to part time jobs when they do hire them thus deferred compensation plays a larger role in reducing the chances of older workers being hired into full time jobs than would be inferred from past estimates simply examining their odds of being hired at all

structural models of family labor supply a discrete choice approach a static neoclassical structural model is presented explaining labor supply of both spouses in two adult households in the netherlands family preferences are described with a direct translog utility function with the husbands leisure the wifes leisure and family income as its arguments we assume that the choice set of each family is finite account is taken of the dutch tax and benefits system we allow for hours restrictions and random preferences and account for unobserved wages of nonworkers the models are estimated using smooth simulated maximum likelihood results based upon dutch cross section data from 1987 are illustrated by confidence intervals for elasticities and by several policy simulations excerpt

can social security explain trends in labor force participation of older men in the united states after a long decline the labor force participation rate lfpr of older men in the united states leveled off in the 1980s and began to increase in the late 1990s we examine how changes in social security rules affected these trends we attribute only a small portion of the decline from the 1960s 80s to the increasing generosity of social security over this period increases in the full retirement age and the delayed retirement credit explain one quarter to one half of the recent increase in the lfpr increasing educational attainment and increasing lfpr of married women also contributed to the recent rise

do retirement dreams come true the effect of unanticipated events on retirement plans analyzing data from the retirement history study the authors find that the retirement plans of male workers aged 58 63 in 1969 were significantly affected by unanticipated events over the next decade specifically unanticipated increases in social security wealth induced retirement earlier than originally planned as did deterioration in personal health whereas the recession of the 1970s tended to delay retirement this evidence that policy changes do affect retirement behavior in systematic ways provides support for the decision by congress to defer until the turn of the century the application of several important provisions of the 1983 amendments to the social security act

why have the labor force participation rates of older men increased since the mid 1990s this article seeks to explain the substantial increases in older men s labor force participation rates observed since the mid 1990s using data from the united states canada and the united kingdom i exploit the cohort effects driving recent increases in older women s participation rates to identify the effect of a wife s participation decision on her husband s participation decision i then decompose the changes in older married men s participation rates demonstrating that husbands responses to increases in wives participation in the labor force can explain one fourth one half and one third of the increase in the united states canada and the united kingdom respectively

labor market shocks and retirement do government programs matter abstract this paper argues that labor market conditions are an important and often overlooked determinant of retirement transitions in our analysis we examine how the unemployment rate affects retirement and whether the social security ss system and unemployment insurance ui system influence how older workers respond to labor market shocks we use pooled cross sectional data from the march current population survey cps in our analysis we find that downturns in the labor market increase retirement transitions and that the magnitude of this effect is comparable to that associated with moderate changes in financial incentives to retire and to the threat of a health shock facing older workers interestingly retirements only increase in response to an economic downturn once workers become ss eligible suggesting that retirement benefits may help to alleviate the income loss associated with a weak labor market we also estimate the impact of ui generosity on retirement and find little consistent evidence of an effect this suggests that in some ways ss may serve as a more effective form of unemployment insurance for older workers than ui

labor force dynamics of older men this paper describes and analyzes movements of older men among labor force states in the united states using quarterly observations derived from the retirement history survey rhs the results indicate substantial undercounts in the biannual data indicating that the prevalence of labor force movements at older ages has been underestimated previously the results show that labor force dynamics at older ages are important including duration and spell occurrence dependence and work experience effects these effects are robust to nonparametric controls for unobserved heterogeneity the estimates indicate that social security benefits have strong effects on the timing of labor force transitions at older ages but that changes in social security benefit levels over time have not contributed much to the trend toward earlier labor force exit excerpt

thresholds in the process of international financial integration abstract the financial crisis has re ignited the fierce debate about the merits of financial globalization and its implications for growth especially for developing countries the empirical literature has not been able to conclusively establish the presumed growth benefits of financial integration indeed a new literature proposes that the indirect benefits of financial integration may be more important than the traditional financing channel emphasized in previous analyses a major complication however is that there seem to be certain threshold levels of financial and institutional development that an economy needs to attain before it can derive the indirect benefits and reduce the risks of financial openness in this paper we develop a unified empirical framework for characterizing such threshold conditions we find that there are clearly identifiable thresholds in variables such as financial depth and institutional quality the cost benefit trade off from financial openness improves significantly once these threshold conditions are satisfied we also find that the thresholds are lower for foreign direct investment and portfolio equity liabilities compared to those for debt liabilities

understanding joint retirement abstract evidence from different sources shows that spouses retirement decisions are correlated retirement policies affecting individuals in couples are therefore also likely to affect behavior of their spouses it is therefore important to account for joint features in modeling retirement this paper studies a structural collective model of labor supply and retirement of both partners in a couple with interdependent preferences imperfect knowledge of preferences of the spouse and subjective expectations about the future we propose a novel method to estimate preferences and the intra household bargaining process which relies on stated preferences data collected in the health and retirement study respondents were asked to choose between hypothetical retirement trajectories describing the retirement ages and replacement rates of both spouses from three perspectives considering their own preferences only the preferences of their spouse only or the most likely decision for the household with these data all model parameters are identified and potential sources of joint retirement can be disentangled our results suggest that males misperceive their wives preferences overestimating their disutility of work our estimates correct for this we find strong positive correlations between preferences for joint leisure leisure complementarity of the two partners counterfactual simulations with stylized retirement paths suggest that the leisure complementarities explain a substantial part of joint retirement much more than correlation in unobserved heterogeneity or potential wage rates

are children really inferior goods evidence from displacement driven income shocks abstract this paper explores the causal link between income and fertility by analyzing women s fertility response to the large and permanent income shock generated by a husband s job displacement i find that the shock reduces total fertility suggesting that the causal effect of income on fertility is positive a model that incorporates the time cost of children and assortative matching of spouses can simultaneously explain this result and the negative cross sectional relationship i also find that a husband s displacement accelerates childbearing which is consistent with lifecycle models of fertility in which the incentive to delay is driven by expected earnings growth

multivariate mixed proportional hazard modelling of the joint retirement of married couples we analyse the joint distribution of the durations until retirement of danish husbands and wives we estimate a multivariate mixed proportional hazards model that allows for interdependence in the times to retirement of spouses we find evidence of strong complementarities in leisure times symmetrically for husband and wife low own income and poor health are found to induce individual retirement prior to spouse s retirement whereas low spousal income is not and neither party is found likely to substitute own for purchased care when the spouse is in poor health furthermore high wealth and low income are found to spur joint simultaneous retirement copyright 2004 john wiley sons ltd

should i stay or should i go an econometric analysis of retirement decisions by couples abstractthis article analyses retirement decisions from a household perspective treating the retirement timing of spouses as potentially interdependent choices to identify the determinants of ret

international financial integration and economic growth abstract this paper uses new data and new econometric techniques to investigate the impact of international financial integration on economic growth and also to assess whether this relationship depends on the level of economic development financial development legal system development government corruption and macroeconomic policies using a wide array of measures of international financial integration for 57 countries and an assortment of statistical methodologies we are unable to reject the null hypothesis that international financial integration does not accelerate economic growth even when controlling for particular economic financial institutional and policy characteristics

job search requirements for unemployed at the end of working life effects on unemployment dynamics and self employment probabilities this paper investigates the extent to which job search requirements in unemployment insurance u i increase the probability of self employment as a retirement route for causal identification we apply a difference in differences approach using a dutch 2004 policy reform that introduced job search requirements in u i for persons aged 57 5 and older unemployment dynamics and self employment probabilities are studied using a dynamic multinomial logit model with unobserved heterogeneity the results suggest that job search requirements stimulated people to exit unemployment and discouraged older workers to enter unemployment the probability of self employment as an exit route to retirement increased relative to u i but not relative to paid employment

how social security and medicare affect retirement behavior in a world of incomplete markets this paper provides an empirical analysis of how the u s social security and medicare insurance system affect the labor supply of older males in the presence of incomplete markets for loans annuities and health insurance we estimate a detailed dynamic programming dp model of the joint labor supply and social security acceptance decision focusing on a sample of males in the low to middle income brackets whose only pension is social security the dp model delivers a rich set of predictions about the dynamics of retirement behavior and comparisons of actual vs predicted behavior show that the dp model is able to account for wide variety of phenomena observed in the data including the pronounced peaks in the distribution of retirement ages at 62 and 65 the ages of early and normal eligibility for social security benefits respectively we identify a significant fraction of health insurance constrained individuals who have no form of retiree health insurance other than medicare and who can only obtain fairly priced private health insurance via their employer s group health plan the combination of significant individual risk aversion and a long tailed pareto distribution of health care expenditures implies that there is a significant security value for these individuals to remain employed until they are eligible for medicare coverage at age 65 overall our model suggests that a number of heretofore puzzling aspects of retirement behavior can be viewed as artifacts of particular details of the social security rules whose incentive effects are especially strong for lower income individuals and those who do not have access to fairly priced loans annuities and health insurance

market structure and innovation a survey economics we all recite deals with allocation of limited resources towards satisfaction of unlimited wants resources are typically identified as land labor and capital plus a technology that determines their transformation into consumer goods disparity between the available goods and services and the desired gives rise to scarcity and the question of what how and for whom to produce the focus then shifts to description and evaluation of alternative resource allocation mechanisms for making the choices the pareto criterion by which an allocation of resources is deemed efficient if any reallocation improving the position of some individual worsens the position of others is a commonly employed gauge of a mechanism s performance in the absence of externalities increasing returns to scale and uncertainty a perfectly competitive market system yields a pareto optimal allocation of resources this underlies the view that individual self interest is compatible with society s interest the further conclusion that pareto optimality may not be achieved via the market system in the presence of monopoly elements provides an economic rationale for antitrust laws the objective of a resource allocation mechanism appears to be according to the analysis described above to make the best of available resources the alternative objective of relaxing constraints through expanding the resource base or developing new technology seems to be beyond its scope thus until rather recently technical advance had been regarded in the mainstream of economic theory as unmotivated by the quest for profits and substantially unaffected by resource allocation instead as j schmookler observed technology had been viewed as a parameter like the weather affecting the outcome of resource allocations but itself unaffected by them 84 1965 evidence that technological progress has significantly contributed to growth in productivity together with a substantial increase in research and development activity largely financed by government and carried out by industry see f machlup 51 1962 may have spurred reconsideration of this view once technical advance is regarded as an economic variable it is natural to in

capital account liberalization financial development and industry growth a synthetic view this paper synthesizes studies analyzing the effects of capital account liberalization on industry growth while controlling for financial crises domestic financial development and the strength of institutions we find evidence that financial openness has positive effects on the growth of financially dependent industries although these growth enhancing effects evaporate during financial crises further analysis indicates that the positive effects of capital account liberalization are limited to countries with relatively well developed financial systems good accounting standards strong creditor rights and rule of law it suggests that countries must reach a certain threshold in terms of institutional and economic development before they can expect to benefit from capital account liberalization

worker retirement responses to pension incentives do they respond to pension wealth abstract pension enhancements generate pension wealth spikes at the eligibility milestones i analyze two major enhancements that generated different gains in pension wealth for eligible workers the responsiveness of retirement behavior to these enhancements depends on how well workers understand their pension incentives to test the retirement response to pension wealth i use administrative data from missouri teachers and leverage variation in enhancement impacts on teacher pension wealth owing to differences in teachers entering ages i find that retirements respond strongly to pension enhancements but the strength of the response does not align with their pecuniary value my findings contribute to a growing body of research showing that workers have imperfect knowledge of their pension benefits and they use imprecise information to make retirement timing decisions

locate your nearest exit mass layoffs and local labor market response large shocks to local labor markets can cause long lasting changes to employment unemployment and the local labor force this study examines the relationship between mass layoffs and the long run

a structural retirement model the life cycle model analyzed here constrains most work on the main job to be full time partial retirement entails a wage reduction and frequently a job change maximum likelihood estimates of utility function parameters are designed to incorporate information on the age of leaving full time work and the age of full retirement the model closely tracks retirement behavior including peaks in retirement activity at 62 and 65 the paper explores the relation of these peaks to nonlinearities in the budget constraint created by various retirement programs policy analyses based on this and on earlier models with simpler structures are compared the retirement choice is one of the more prominent manifestations of life cycle behavior the decision is the result of an interplay between an individual s preferences and a set of incentives which change in complicated ways as the individual progresses through his or her late 50 s and 60 s the purpose of this study is to formulate and estimate a structural model which incorporates in a fundamental way this interplay between lifetime preferences and incentives and to illustrate how such a model may be used to investigate retirement behavior a structural model of this type is essential for analyzing potential policy changes which can be expected to affect incentives in varying ways over a number of years in the life cycle the current study incorporates two structural features which have frequently been omitted from previous studies first the model requires that an individual who wishes to reduce work effort below full time must accept a reduced hourly wage rate in order to do so this reflects empirical evidence from micro data sets which indicates that around one third of older individuals engage in part time work at one time or another and that regardless of whether or not these older workers change jobs to obtain part time work they usually take wage cuts as compared to their previous full time work 2 the fact that an individual is willing to accept a lower wage rate in return for the opportunity to work fewer than full time hours contains important information about the preferences of the

financial development and openness evidence from panel data abstract this paper addresses the empirical question of whether trade and financial openness can help explain the recent pace in financial development as well as its variation across countries in recent years utilising annual data from developing and industrialised countries and dynamic panel estimation techniques we provide evidence which suggests that both types of openness are statistically significant determinants of banking sector development our findings reveal that the marginal effects of trade financial openness are negatively related to the degree of financial trade openness indicating that relatively closed economies stand to benefit most from opening up their trade and or capital accounts although these economies may be able to accomplish more by taking steps to open both their trade and capital accounts opening up one without the other could still generate gains in terms of banking sector development thus our findings provide only partial support to the well known rajan and zingales hypothesis which stipulates that both types of openness are necessary for financial development to take place

social security and two earner households in the past decades elimination of the pay as you go system in u s has been extensively discussed and studied such an elimination would also eliminate the intra cohort redistribution done by the following policies of social security due to spousal and survivor s beneflt provisions the system redistributes mostly to single earner married households not necessarily progressive retirement beneflts are a concave function of past mean earnings hence the system redistributes from high earners to low earners finally the existence of a cap on social security taxable earnings makes the system regressive this is the flrst paper that quantifles redistributive labor supply and welfare implications of these policies using a general equilibrium life cycle model agents start out as permanently married or single and with education levels and wage proflles where the latter depend both on education and gender the household is the decision maker and decides on the labor supply of its member s and saving the aggregate production function has as inputs capital and labor aggregated by e ciency elimination of these policies results in a 6 1 increase in married female labor force participation rate the middle income single earner married households experience the largest welfare losses whereas the high income two earner households together with high income single households experience the largest welfare gains

does location matter for firms r d behaviour empirical evidence for danish firms in this paper we analyse whether regional location matters for danish firms r d performance in accordance with kleinknecht and poot s 1992 survey we test the urban hierarchy hypothesis stating that firms in urban agglomerations are more likely to perform r d than firms elsewhere using a micro dataset for danish firms obtained by merging danish r d statistics with account data the evidence of the influence of location on both the probability for undertaking r d and r d intensity is mixed but basically not in favour of any urban hierarchy in danish r d other non regional factors such as size of firm sectoral dummies classified according to pavitt s taxonomy and the dummy controlling for ict service industries are also estimated to have significant influence on firms r d behaviour furthermore the age of a firm only affects its r d intensity significantly cet article cherche a analyser si oui ou non la localisation regionale est importante pour le comportement des entreprises danoises quant

how do financial resources affect the timing of retirement after a job separation this study examines working people between the ages of 50 and 70 years old and the conditions that lead them to decide to retire or not after they experience a job separation based on data from the survey of income and program participation the author finds that among individuals whose jobless spells end in retirement most decide to retire within a year after separation the availability of resources such as social security retirement benefits high net worth and income from defined benefit pensions appear to encourage more rapid labor force exit and retirement rather than supporting job seekers during a long search perhaps surprisingly no correlation between retirement and the unemployment rate occurs but unemployment insurance benefits do delay retirement these results suggest little tolerance for long job searches regardless of labor market prospects and indicate that those who can afford to retire will do so rather quickly

married women s retirement expectations do pensions and social security matter twenty five years ago married women s retirement decisions were strongly influenced by their husbands health and retirement status factors determining the value of women s nonmarket time in contrast their own economic opportunity set wages social security entitlements and employer pension benefits appeared to have little effect on their decisions to leave the labor force married women currently forming expectations regarding retirement differ in important ways from this earlier generation they have spent more time in the labor force earned higher wages and accumulated substantial pension rights both private and public they also have lower probabilities of remaining married in 1970 82 percent of u s women aged 45 54 were manried while 5 percent were divorced by 1992 only 73 percent were married while 16 percent were divorced thus husbands pension and social security benefits are less likely to provide economic security in retirement for the current generation of preretirement married women their expectations regarding retirement should reflect these changing conditions relative to earlier cohorts married women s retirernent plans should be more strongly influenced by considerations of their own economic returns from continued employment while of interest for its labor supply implications this issue is a matter of public concern because of growing evidence that divorce has wide ranging consequences for the economic well being of postretirement women william h crown et al 1993 findings from the new health and retirement survey indicate that older married women s expectations of working after age 62 are strongly influenced by their expected wage nonwage compensation such as employer provided health and disability insurance and pension income expected social security entitlements also appear important although the evidence for their effect is weaker like the earlier generation wives are also influenced by their husbands plans suggesting a tendency toward joint retirement

employment and retirement following a late career job loss the frequency of job loss among workers in late career has risen disproportionately in recent years the effects of job loss on these workers are potentially severe their earnings capacity savings and retirement expectations are likely to be dramatically affected and they may take substantially longer to be re employed however despite these reasons for heightened concern relatively little is known about the economic consequences of late career job loss among recent cohorts of workers this paper presents findings from an ongoing research project using the health and retirement study that focuses on the economic impacts of late career job loss on employment and retirement patterns as well as on earnings and assets this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

back to work expectations and realizations of work after retirement this paper analyzes a puzzling aspect of retirement behavior known as unretirement nearly 50 percent of retirees follow a nontraditional retirement path that involves partial retirement or unretirement and at least 26 percent of retirees later unretire i explore two possible explanations 1 unretirement transitions result from failures in planning or financial shocks and 2 unretirement transitions are anticipated prior to retirement reflecting a more complex retirement process i show that unretirement was anticipated for the vast majority of those returning to work and is not a result of financial shocks poor planning or low wealth accumulation

retirement behaviour of dutch elderly households we specify and estimate retirement models for singles and married couples and estimate these on data from the dutch socio economic panel we perform some simulations and find strong effects of retirement options in determining the retirement behaviour within different household types model estimates are used to simulate the effect of relevant retirement policies across subgroups we find that the disadvantageous treatment of the old age pension in the netherlands for married households with two earners has unintended perverse effects on the labour market behaviour of couples copyright 2004 john wiley sons ltd