Valuing jobs via retirement: European evidence

While much has been made of the value of employment relative to unemployment, much less is known about the value of work relative to retirement. We here use two European panel datasets to first show that psychological well-being (measured on the EURO-D and GHQ scales) barely changes on average when individuals retire. However, there is a great deal of heterogeneity in the size of the change between job type and between individuals. Some gain on leaving work, while others experience substantial falls in well-being on retiring, suggesting that they may have preferred to carry on working. We suggest that the results of these analyses can help to inform policy aiming to encourage labour supply by older workers.job quality ; well-being ; employment ; retirement

Altitude as handicap in rank-order football tournaments

In 2007, based on medical reports, FIFA ruled that no international football competition could be played in stadiums with an altitude higher than 2500 meters. We provide stark evidence which supports the claim that playing in high altitude benefits the home team through two channels. First, in these scenarios, high altitude teams (HAT) do better against low altitude teams than against other high altitude teams. Second, every time that low altitude teams visit other high altitude teams they get fewer points than if they had played in a low altitude stadium. Therefore, the HAT go up in the ranking of the southamerican qualifiers for world cups, not only because of their own extra-advantage of playing in high altitudes, but also because the LAT do worse in all high altitude stadiums. According to our work, have this ruling taken effect, Ecuador would not have gone to the 2006 world cup, and therefore Ecuador's Football Federation would have lost at least 40 million dollars given out by FIFA to all teams going to the world cup

Retirement and the Marginal Utility of Income

The individual level of subjective well-being (SWB) has been shown to predict a number of future observable outcomes. Behaviour may however also be affected by the slope of SWB with respect to certain variables. We here use latentclass analysis to model both intercept and slope heterogeneity in the SWB-income relationship, and construct a continuous measure of the marginal utility of income.We show this marginal utility does predict future behaviour: those who value income more (who have a higher income elasticity of well-being) are less likely to retire. This correlation is found conditional on both the level of income and the level of well-being

Surprise me if you can: influence of newspaper endorsements in US Presidential elections

Using the daily trade of futures from the prediction markets site Intrade, we pin down the effect of printed newspapers endorsements (announcement of an explicit support for a political candidate) on the candidates' likelihood of winning. It is established that unexpected endorsements have a large impact on voters' behavior. However, we show that this effect is only true when the endorsement is a coherent one: if a newspaper that praises conservative (liberal) policies endorses a candidate with liberal (conservative) ideas, the endorsement does not impact the candidate's probability of winning, as it is regarded as incoherent. Our measure for coherence comes from Gentzkow and Shapiro (2005), but we also use Ansolabehere and Snyder (2004)'s \propensity to endorse Democrats" to show that a surprise endorsement has a large and potentially tipping effect in a tied contes

Gender inequality in paid and unpaid work during Covid-19 times

We employ real-time household data to study the impact of the pandemic lockdown on paid and unpaid work in Spain. We document large employment losses that affected more severely low-skilled workers and to some extent college educated women. We show that the pandemic resulted in an increase in the gender gap in total hours worked, including paid and unpaid work. This is due to the smaller decrease in paid work hours among women that was not compensated by a smaller increase in unpaid work. We also examine the impact of the lockdown on within-household specialization patterns. We find that while men slightly increased their participation in home production, the burden continued to be borne by women, irrespective of their labor market situation. This evidence suggests that traditional explanations cannot account for the unequal distribution of the domestic workload. Additional analysis supports gender norms as a plausible explanation for our findings

The COVID-19 curtain: can past communist regimes explain the vaccination divide in Europe?

As of November 2021, all former Communist countries from Central and Eastern Europe exhibit lower vaccination rates than Western European countries. Can institutional inheritance explain, at least in part, this heterogeneity in vaccination decisions across Europe? To study this question we exploit novel data from the second wave of the SHARE (Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe) Covid-19 Survey fielded in Summer 2021 that covers 27 European countries and Israel. First, we document lower Covid-19 vaccine take-up amongst individuals above 55 years old who were born under Communism in Europe. Next, we turn to reunified Germany to get closer to a causal effect of exposure to Iron curtain regimes. We find that exposure to the Communist regime in East Germany decreases one’s probability to get vaccinated against Covid-19 by 8 percentage points, increases that of not wanting the vaccine by 4 percentage points. Both effects are quite large and statistically significant, and they hold when controlling for individual socio-economic and demographic characteristics. We identify low social capital -measured as voluntary work, political engagement, trust in people- as a plausible channel through which past Communist regimes would still affect individuals’ preferences for Covid-19 vaccination.Centro de Estudios Distributivos, Laborales y Sociale

Motherhood, labor market trajectories, and the allocation of talent: harmonized evidence on 29 countries

In this paper we assess whether changes in labor market decisions upon motherhood lead to potential inefficient allocations of talent. Using an event study approach with retrospective data drawn from SHARE for 29 European countries we show that motherhood effects go beyond the well studied effects of labor market participation decisions: the arrival of the first child substantially affects the uptaking of alternative modes of employment, such as part-time and self-employment, that are characterized by flexible or reduced work schedules but also lower pay on average. We also show that the size of labor market responses to motherhood are larger in societies with more conservative social-norms or with weak policies regarding work-life balance. To assess the effects of motherhood over the allocation of talent, we explore how labor market responses to parenthood vary by alternative measures of talent or ability. We find that all women, even those with the highest level of ability and abler than their husbands face large motherhood effects, while men show virtually no changes in the labor market when becoming fathers. We also find that mothers who become self-employed after the birth of the first child are those that are less entrepreneurial-able according to cognitive ability and personality traits shown to impair business survival. Overall, our results suggest relevant changes in the allocation of talent caused by gender differences in nonmarket responsibilities that can have sizable impacts on aggregate market productivity.Centro de Estudios Distributivos, Laborales y Sociale

Motherhood, labor market trajectories, and the allocation of talent: harmonized evidence on 29 countries

In this paper we assess whether changes in labor market decisions upon motherhood lead to potential inefficient allocations of talent. Using an event study approach with retrospective data drawn from SHARE for 29 European countries we show that motherhood effects go beyond the well studied effects of labor market participation decisions: the arrival of the first child substantially affects the uptaking of alternative modes of employment, such as part-time and self-employment, that are characterized by flexible or reduced work schedules but also lower pay on average. We also show that the size of labor market responses to motherhood are larger in societies with more conservative social-norms or with weak policies regarding work-life balance. To assess the effects of motherhood over the allocation of talent, we explore how labor market responses to parenthood vary by alternative measures of talent or ability. We find that all women, even those with the highest level of ability and abler than their husbands face large motherhood effects, while men show virtually no changes in the labor market when becoming fathers. We also find that mothers who become self-employed after the birth of the first child are those that are less entrepreneurial-able according to cognitive ability and personality traits shown to impair business survival. Overall, our results suggest relevant changes in the allocation of talent caused by gender differences in nonmarket responsibilities that can have sizable impacts on aggregate market productivity.Centro de Estudios Distributivos, Laborales y Sociale