October 2020

29Oct

The Changing Nature of Work and Public Pension Coverage: Evidence from the US and Europe

By Axel H. Börsch-Supan, Courtney Coile, Jonathan Cribb, Carl Emmerson and Yuri Pettinicchi We examine non-standard work and its impact on pension coverage via a case study of the US, the UK, and Germany. We find that the share of workers engaged in non-standard work has changed only modestly over time in these three countries, despite the popular perception that a more significant transformation in the nature of work may be underway. We discuss how non-standard work may affect...

October 29, 2020
Articles, Labor Market, System Sustainability, , , ,
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15Oct

Workforce Aging, Pension Reforms, and Firm Outcomes

By Francesca Carta, Francesco D’Amuri, Till Von Wachter Raising statutory retirement ages has been a popular policy to increase the labor supply of older workers in the face of population aging. In this paper, we quantify the effect of a sharp and unexpected increase in retirement ages on firms’ input mix and economic outcomes using Italian administrative and survey data on employment, wages, value added and capital. Exploiting information on lifetime pension contributions for the universe of employees, we...

October 15, 2020
Articles, Labor Market, Regulation, , , , ,
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September 2020

15Sep

Demographic Obstacles to European Growth

By Thomas F. Cooley, Espen Henriksen, Charlie Nusbaum Since the early 1990's the growth rates of the four largest European economies -- France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom -- have slowed. This persistent slowdown suggests a low-frequency structural change is at work. A combination of longer individual life expectancies and declining fertility have led to gradually aging populations. Growth accounting identifies the following five sources of economic growth: total factor productivity, capital deepening, labor supply on...

September 15, 2020
Aging, Articles, Labor Market, , ,
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15Sep

The Quality of Employment (QoE) in Nine Latin American Countries: A Multidimensional Perspective

By Kirsten Sehnbruch This paper proposes a methodology for measuring the quality of employment from a multidimensional and public policy perspective in Latin American developing countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay) using household and labor force survey data from 2015. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the QoE can be measured using a multidimensional methodology that can inform policy makers about the state of their labor markets in a way...

September 15, 2020
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August 2020

28Aug

Job and Wage Losses in Informal Sector due to the COVID-19 Lockdown Measures in India

By Xavier Estupinan, Mohit Sharma This paper estimates the job and wage losses of workers, using the lens of informality, due to lockdown measures undertaken by the Government of India to tackle the spread of COVID-19. It focuses on the first two lockdowns when containment measures in India were most stringent in the world. We estimate that 104 million and 69.4 million informally employed workers were at risk of job loss in Lockdown 1.0 and Lockdown 2.0 respectively. Informal...

August 28, 2020
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28Aug

COVID-19 Infections, Labour Market Shocks, and Subjective Well-Being

By Ferdi Botha, John P. Haisken-DeNew This is the first paper to present novel findings on how simultaneously (a) labour market shocks and (b) infections in the household, directly due to COVID-19, have impacted on life satisfaction and domain satisfactions. Using data from a world-wide online survey of almost 5,700 respondents across six countries, we estimate the associations of COVID-19-related labour market shocks and COVID-19 infection with life satisfaction and a range of domain satisfactions. Directly due to COVID-19,...

August 28, 2020
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July 2020

31Jul

Women Working Longer: Increased Employment at Older Ages

By Claudia Goldin, Lawrence F. Katz Today, more American women than ever before stay in the workforce into their sixties and seventies. This trend emerged in the 1980s, and has persisted during the past three decades, despite substantial changes in macroeconomic conditions. Why is this so? Today’s older American women work full-time jobs at greater rates than women in other developed countries. In Women Working Longer, editors...

July 31, 2020
Books, Labor Market, Pension design, ,
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24Jul

Relabeling, Retirement and Regret

By Jonathan Gruber, Ohto Kanninen, Terhi Ravaska Focal retirement ages are a central feature of Social Security programs around the world, and provide a potentially powerful tool for policy makers who are interested in reforming retirement systems to address the growing funding shortfalls. But these tools often come hand in hand with significant changes in the financial structure of Social Security that can have independent, and potentially deleterious, impacts on retirees. In this paper, we use a major reformulation...

July 24, 2020
Articles, Labor Market, Pension design, ,
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10Jul

Society at a Glance

By OECD The OECD biennial report providing internationally comparable data on demography and family characteristics, employment and wealth, mobility and housing, health status, social expenditure, subjective well-being, social cohesion, and other social measures. Included are such interesting variables as suicides, child care costs, prisoners, gender wage gaps, poverty and mothers in employment. Get the book here

July 10, 2020
Aging, Books, Labor Market, ,
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10Jul

Understanding the Greater Diffusion of Mobile Money Innovations in Africa

By Simplice Asongu, Nicholas Biekpe, Danny Cassimon The present research extends Lashitew, van Tulder and Liasse (2019, RP) in order to understand the greater diffusion of mobile money innovations in Africa. To make this assessment, a comparative analysis is engaged between sampled African countries and the corresponding sampled developing countries. Three main types of predictor groups are used for the study, namely: demand, supply and macro-level factors. The empirical evidence is based on Tobit regressions. The tested hypothesis is...

July 10, 2020
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