The optimal legal retirement age in an OLG model with endogenous labour supply

The long run welfare implications of the legal retirement age are studied in a perfect foresight overlapping-generations model where agents live for two periods. Agents’ lifetime is divided between working life and retirement by a legal retirement age controlled by the government whereas agents, besides savings, control the intensive margin or "yearly" labour supply. The legal retirement age is utilized to dampen distortionary effects of payroll taxes and public pension annuities and promote capital accumulation. We show that a social optimal legal retirement age exists and how it depends on whether payroll taxes or benefit annuities ensures budget balance of the PAYG pension system.Optimal legal retirement age; pay-as-you-go-pension systems; overlapping-generations model

The diffusion of health technologies: Cultural and biological divergence

This paper proposes the hypothesis that genetic distance to the health frontier influences population health outcomes. Evidence from a world sample suggests that genetic distance - interpreted as long-term cultural and biological divergence - is an important factor in understanding health inequalities across countries. In particular, the paper documents a remarkably robust link between genetic distance and health as measured by life expectancy at birth and the adult survival rate. Also, the evidence reveals that the link has strengthened considerably over the 20th century which highlights the increasing effects of globalization on health conditions across countries through the transmission of health technologies.Population health; international diffusion of health technologies; globalization; cultural and biological divergence

Fertility and early-life mortality: Evidence from smallpox vaccination in Sweden

We examine how the introduction of smallpox vaccination affected early-life mortality and fertility in Sweden during the first half of the 19th century. We demonstrate that parishes in counties with higher levels of smallpox mortality prior to the introduction of vaccination experienced a greater decline in infant mortality afterwards. Exploiting this finding in an instrumental-variable approach reveals that this decline had a negative effect on the birth rate, while the number of surviving children and population growth remained unaffected. These results suggest that the decline in early-life mortality cannot account for the onset of the fertility decline in Sweden

Fertility and early-life mortality: Evidence from smallpox vaccination in Sweden

We examine how the introduction of smallpox vaccination affected early-life mortality and fertility in Sweden during the first half of the 19th century. We demonstrate that parishes in counties with higher levels of smallpox mortality prior to the introduction of vaccination experienced a greater decline in infant mortality afterwards. Exploiting this finding in an instrumental-variable approach reveals that this decline had a negative effect on the birth rate, while the number of surviving children and population growth remained unaffected. These results suggest that the decline in early-life mortality cannot account for the onset of the fertility decline in Sweden

How the other half died: immigration and mortality in US cities

Fears of immigrants as a threat to public health have a long and sordid history. At the turn of the 20th century, when immigrants made up one-third of the population in crowded American cities, contemporaries blamed high urban mortality rates on the newest arrivals. We evaluate how the implementation of country-specific immigration quotas in the 1920s affected urban health. Cities with larger quota-induced reductions in immigration experienced a persistent decline in mortality rates, driven by a reduction in deaths from infectious diseases. The unfavorable living conditions immigrants endured explains the majority of the effect as quotas reduced residential crowding and mortality declines were largest in cities where immigrants resided in more crowded conditions and where public health resources were stretched thinnest.First author draf

Measurement of the cross-section and charge asymmetry of WW bosons produced in proton-proton collisions at s=8\sqrt{s}=8 TeV with the ATLAS detector

This paper presents measurements of the $W^+ \rightarrow \mu^+\nu$ and $W^- \rightarrow \mu^-\nu$ cross-sections and the associated charge asymmetry as a function of the absolute pseudorapidity of the decay muon. The data were collected in proton--proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV with the ATLAS experiment at the LHC and correspond to a total integrated luminosity of 20.2~\mbox{fb^{-1}}. The precision of the cross-section measurements varies between 0.8% to 1.5% as a function of the pseudorapidity, excluding the 1.9% uncertainty on the integrated luminosity. The charge asymmetry is measured with an uncertainty between 0.002 and 0.003. The results are compared with predictions based on next-to-next-to-leading-order calculations with various parton distribution functions and have the sensitivity to discriminate between them.Comment: 38 pages in total, author list starting page 22, 5 figures, 4 tables, submitted to EPJC. All figures including auxiliary figures are available at https://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/PAPERS/STDM-2017-13

Search for new phenomena in final states with an energetic jet and large missing transverse momentum in pp collisions at √ s = 8 TeV with the ATLAS detector

Results of a search for new phenomena in final states with an energetic jet and large missing transverse momentum are reported. The search uses 20.3 fb−1 of √ s = 8 TeV data collected in 2012 with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. Events are required to have at least one jet with pT > 120 GeV and no leptons. Nine signal regions are considered with increasing missing transverse momentum requirements between Emiss T > 150 GeV and Emiss T > 700 GeV. Good agreement is observed between the number of events in data and Standard Model expectations. The results are translated into exclusion limits on models with either large extra spatial dimensions, pair production of weakly interacting dark matter candidates, or production of very light gravitinos in a gauge-mediated supersymmetric model. In addition, limits on the production of an invisibly decaying Higgs-like boson leading to similar topologies in the final state are presente