Individuals who serve in the military substitute work experience for post-secondary educational attainment after high school, leading to large educational attainment gaps between new veterans and observably similar nonveterans. Little is known about the evolution of these gaps by age and across cohorts. We investigate the life-cycle attainment of veterans relative to nonveterans using a synthetic panel data approach. Following five multiyear birth cohorts we find that, on average, veterans close a 20-percentage point gap in attainment of a bachelor's or greater over time and significantly outpace observably similar nonveterans in attainment of an associate's degree. Female and minority veterans exceeded the attainment of similar nonveterans over time, and more recent birth cohorts began with larger gaps but closed them at younger ages due to increasing levels of both enrollment and enrollment intensity. Our findings highlight the important role of military service in facilitating social mobility through educational attainment.

As the heterogeneity in life expectancy by socioeconomic status increases, many pension systems imply a wealth transfer from short- to long-lived individuals. Various pension reforms aim to reduce inequalities that are caused by ex-ante differences in life expectancy. However, these pension reforms may induce redistribution effects. We introduce a dynamic general equilibrium-overlapping generations model with heterogeneous individuals that differ in their education, labor supply, lifetime income, and life expectancy. Within this framework we study six different pension reforms that foster the sustainability of the pension system and aim to account for heterogeneous life expectancy. Our results highlight that pension reforms have to be evaluated at various dimensions. Reforms that may increase the sustainability of the pension system are not necessarily conducive to reduce the redistributive wealth transfers from short- to long-lived individuals. Our paper emphasizes the need for studying pension reforms in models with behavioral feedback and heterogeneous socioeconomic groups.

Exposure to extreme shocks in early life is found to have a lasting impact in adulthood. Exploiting the variation in exposure measured by age and intensity of an earthquake, we evaluate the impact of a 7.7 MW earthquake in Gujarat, India, on the health stock of children who were in utero or below three years. Using the India Human Development Survey data from 2004–05 and earthquake intensity data, we find an affected girl child to be shorter by at least 2.5 cm at the age of 3–6 years. The earthquake seems to have destroyed the household infrastructures and health facilities, affecting the expecting mothers and newborn children. The households using services to meet nutritional needs of children and pregnant women seem to be least affected. Our findings recommend faster reconstruction activities and highlight the importance of universal healthcare and nutritional delivery services to mitigate the impacts of early-life shocks.

While previous studies have confirmed the negative effects of son preference on the prenatal care received by girls, few have examined its effect on birth outcomes. This study contributes to the literature on son preference by examining this relationship. The degree of son preference is measured by the sex ratio at birth, and the data were obtained from the birth registry of South Korea, which has a long history of strong son preference. We find that girls are more likely to be born with low birth weight when son preference is stronger. In addition, when son preference is stronger, girls are more likely to be born outside hospitals, which implies that mothers conceiving girls make fewer prenatal visits to the hospital when their son preference is stronger.

Pesticide handling is a critical component of many food supply chains yet labor markets for pesticide handlers are little studied. This study uses data from the U.S. national survey to show that relative to other farmworkers, pesticide handlers get paid 15% more. To understand this premium, matching techniques are used to identify workers who are observationally equivalent in every way except pesticide handling. Using these methods, approximately half of the wage premium can be related back to observable characteristics, including crop type, geographic location, legal work authorization, education, experience, and other personal characteristics.

I compare pre-tax and post-tax wealth levels and trends after netting out implicit taxes on tax-deferred assets and accrued capital gains. The analysis covers 1983–2016 for net worth (NW) and augmented wealth (AW), which includes pension and Social Security wealth. Netting out implicit taxes substantially reduces growth in mean and median NW and AW. However, the upward trajectory in NW and AW inequality is basically unchanged from using post-tax values. I also introduce bequest wealth, the value of the estate including death benefits. It is notably more equal than NW and has grown faster over time.

We investigate gender differences across multiple dimensions after 3 months of the first UK lockdown of March 2020, using an online sample of approximately 1,500 Prolific respondents’ residents in the UK. We find that women's mental health was worse than men along the four metrics we collected data on, that women were more concerned about getting and spreading the virus, and that women perceived the virus as more prevalent and lethal than men did. Women were also more likely to expect a new lockdown or virus outbreak by the end of 2020, and were more pessimistic about the contemporaneous and future state of the UK economy, as measured by their forecasted contemporaneous and future unemployment rates. We also show that between earlier in 2020 before the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic and June 2020, women had increased childcare and housework more than men. Neither the gender gaps in COVID-19-related health and economic concerns nor the gender gaps in the increase in hours of childcare and housework can be accounted for by a rich set of control variables. Instead, we find that the gender gap in mental health can be partially accounted for by the difference in COVID-19-related health concerns between men and women.

Pensions may be provided for in a modern society by a mix of several methods, namely by voluntary individual savings, mandatory fully-funded occupational pension systems, mandatory social security financed by pay-as-you-go, and old-fashioned hoarding in cash. We call a specific mixture of the four systems a pension composition. We assume that individual workers decide on their own individual savings, that the fully-funded occupational system is decided upon by the age cohort of the median worker, and that social security is decided upon by the median voter. We assume that individual and collective pension savings are the only sources of capital supply. When capital supply equals demand from industry, there is equilibrium in the capital market with a corresponding equilibrium interest rate and pension composition. In this paper, we assume a demography with one hundred age brackets and we investigate how changes in the birth rates, survival rates, and the retirement age affect the pension composition and the capital market equilibrium. Our conclusion is that for a given technology, the pension composition and the interest rate are determined by the demography and cannot be modified at will as a long-term political instrument.

This paper studies how the rates of deduction for early retirement have to be determined in pay-as-you-go (PAYG) systems in order to keep their budget stable. The derivation of these deductions requires the use of a multiperiod intertemporal budget constraint that involves assumptions about the retirement behavior of past, present, and future cohorts. In general, it is not possible to calculate budget-neutral deductions from the budget constraint of a single individual who retires before the target retirement age—an approach that dominates the related literature. Only for specific cases one can use this second approach but then one has to adjust the discount rate to the assumption about collective retirement. If there is only one deviating individual, then the right choice is the market interest rate while for a stationary retirement distribution it is the internal rate of return of the PAYG system. In this case, the necessary deductions are lower than under the standard approach. This is also true for retirement ages that fluctuate randomly around a stationary distribution. Various long-run developments (e.g., increases in life expectancy or permanent changes in the average retirement age) might cause challenges for the sustainability of the pension system. These developments, however, can only be dealt with by adequate adjustments to the basic pension formulas and not by the use of deduction rates.

The Amish collective objection to high school education and refusal to comply with compulsory schooling laws can be interpreted with a religious-club-good framework. According to the religious-club interpretation, the Amish use the restriction on secular education as a religious prohibition and sacrifice to improve the welfare of sect members. I exploit the 1972 U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Wisconsin vs. Yoder, which exempts Amish children from compulsory high school education, as a policy shock to test several key predictions of the religious-club explanations. The evidence suggests that the successful restriction on high school education helped the Amish sect exclude individuals with low religious participation, lower members' shadow cost of time, and grow the sect through higher fertility.

Inclusion of additional dimensions to population projections can lead to an improvement in the overall quality of the projections and to an enhanced analytical potential of derived projections such as literacy skills and labor force participation. This paper describes the modeling of educational attainment of a microsimulation projection model of the European Union countries. Using ordered logistic regressions on five waves of the European Social Survey, we estimate the impact of mother's education and other sociocultural characteristics on educational attainment and implement them into the microsimulation model. Results of the different projection scenarios are contrasted to understand how the education of the mother and sociocultural variables may affect projection outcomes. We show that a change in the impact of mother's education on children's educational attainment may have a big effect on future trends. Moreover, the proposed approach yields more consistent population projection outputs for specific subpopulations.

Malaria afflicts mankind since thousands of years and still imposes serious health impediments and considerable mortality on the affected populations. Empirical investigations of the role of malaria for economic development at the country level deliver mixed findings, however. We study the role of long-term malaria exposure on development today using disaggregate within-country variation for the whole of Africa with 1 × 1 degree cells as units of observation. Local development is measured by light density at night. Based on insights from epidemiology, which documents that genetic and acquired immunities reduce Malaria risk for adults in holoendemic areas, the effect is hypothesized to be nonlinear, with a peak for intermediate rather than high exposure to the pathogen. The empirical findings support this hypothesis. The results also suggest the existence of a significant moderating effect of genetic immunities measured by the prevalence of the sickle cell trait in the population.

In this paper, I study how pay-as-you-go pension systems of the notional defined contribution type can be designed such that they remain financially stable in the presence of increasing life expectancy. For this to happen three crucial parameters must be set in an appropriate way: the notional interest rate, the adjustment rate and the annuity conversion factor. I show that there exist two main approaches to implement a stable system. The first uses period-specific annuitization and indexation rates that correct for labor force increases, which are only due to rises in the retirement age which are necessary to ‘neutralize’ the increase in life expectancy. The second approach uses cohort-specific annuitization and indexation rates that are larger than in a stationary situation. This is due to the fact that a continuously increasing life expectancy leads to higher internal rates of return that can be passed on via the indexation.

We analyze the interaction of black–white race with physical and socioeconomic characteristics in the US marriage market, using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We estimate who inter-racially marries whom along anthropometric and socioeconomic characteristics dimensions. The black women who inter-marry are the thinner and more educated in their group; instead, white women are the fatter and less educated; black or white men who inter-marry are poorer and thinner. While women in “mixed” couples find a spouse who is poorer but thinner than if they intra-married, black men match with a white woman who is more educated than if they intra-married, and a white man finds a thinner spouse in a black woman. Our general findings are consistent with the “social status exchange” hypothesis, but the finding that black men who marry white women tend to be poorer than black men who marry black women is not.

This article provides a comprehensive picture of the National Transfer Accounts (NTA), a project that aims at measuring how people produce, consume, save, and share economic resources at every age. It stands today with a unique dataset that includes 47 countries from around the world, permitting a comparative understanding of economic flows within and between generations and over time.