This paper uses transaction-level bank account data from Denmark to study the dynamics of consumer spending during the Covid-19 pandemic. We document that aggregate spending initially dropped by almost 30% but recovered almost fully after the first wave. While spending plummeted in categories severely affected by supply restrictions, it increased in unaffected categories. Individual exposure to health risks and supply restrictions was associated with much larger spending cuts than exposure to income risk and unemployment. The findings suggest that the contraction was mainly caused by temporary health risks and supply restrictions, with a limited role for persistent negative spill-overs. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

The paper exploits Social Security legislation changes to identify the causal effect of Social Security income on out-of-pocket medical expenditures of the elderly. Using the 1986-1994 Consumer Expenditure Survey and an instrumental variables strategy, the empirical results show that health care expenditures are responsive to changes in Social Security income for elderly individuals with less than a high school education. The estimated income elasticities are between 1.41 and 3.47 depending on the outcome measures and are statistically significant at conventional levels. The findings are in contrast to existing studies that find a small income elasticity at the individual/household level.

This paper examines the sources of differences in social mobility between the U.S. and Denmark. Measured by income mobility, Denmark is a more mobile society, but not when measured by educational mobility. There are pronounced nonlinearities in income and educational mobility in both countries. Greater Danish income mobility is largely a consequence of redistributional tax, transfer, and wage compression policies. While Danish social policies for children produce more favorable cognitive test scores for disadvantaged children, these do not translate into more favorable educational outcomes, partly because of disincentives to acquire education arising from the redistributional policies that increase income mobility.

We develop an optimizing life-cycle model of retirement with perfect capital markets. We show that longer healthy life expectancy usually leads to later retirement, but with an elasticity less than unity. We calibrate our model using data from the US and find that, over the last century, the effect of rising incomes, which promote early retirement, has dominated the effect of rising lifespans. Our model predicts continuing declines in the optimal retirement age, despite rising life expectancy, provided the rate of real wage growth remains as high as in the last century.

The effects of international "to and fro" migration on the economic welfare of the migrants and the nonmigrants in the host and home countries are examined. A "to and fro" migrant is defined as a worker who changes residence from origin to destination without any systematic tendency to remain in any of the two permanently. The study is based on the theoretical framework developed by Krauss. The results indicate that "(to and fro) emigration from a source country to a recipient country increases the economic welfare of the migrants and the nonmigrants residing in the host country, but it tends to decrease the welfare of the nonmigrants residing in the source country. In general, the migration also tends to be pareto optimal from a world point of view."

"The structural change model of the demographic transition developed by Easterlin and others is explored empirically by applying the Brown, Durbin and Evans test of structural change to annual data from the transitions of Sweden, Norway, England and Wales, and Finland. The evidence strongly supports the structural change model over traditional models (based on gradual changes in explanatory variables), indicating a supply response of fertility to declining illness and death during the early stages of transition, and a demand response to the death of children during the latter stages, when families are likely to have achieved desired size."

"This article deals with the impact of remittances from emigrants on real incomes for different groups in their country of origin in a two-by-two model with one traded and one nontraded good. It is shown that emigration does not necessarily raise the real income of the emigrants themselves. If the traded good is capital intensive, nonmigrant workers gain and capitalists lose, whereas if it is labor intensive, the outcome depends on what happens to the price of the nontraded good. The result of a rise is that capitalists gain and workers lose, while a fall has the opposite effect."

"Migration flows in the integrated Nordic labor market are heavily dominated by Finnish migration to Sweden. Differences in migration behavior across the Nordic populations are identified. Elasticities of migration are obtained from a logistic human capital model estimated as seemingly unrelated regressions. Differences in migration behavior are shown to exist, but the elasticities are not systematically higher for the Finns as could be expected. The domination of Finnish migration to Sweden is instead explained by real wage differences and since these have narrowed, major migration flows should not be expected in the future, unless large differences in labor market performance arise."

"The population of the United States is aging. We review a variety of the implications this has for U.S. national saving rates, and discuss the policy issues that they raise. After reviewing what different models would predict for household saving over the next several decades, we consider how the demographic transition may also affect national saving through changes in government behavior. Ways in which the composition of household saving might change as individuals age are also analyzed along with the implications of changes in government fiscal policy for asset composition."

"An implementation of the theory of labor migration under asymmetric information shows that return migration arises from the reinstatement of informational symmetry which induces low-skill workers, who are no longer pooled with high-skill workers, to return. When workers in an occupation constitute more than two skill levels, say four (without loss of generality), the following patterns emerge: Migration is sequential, that is, it proceeds in waves. Each wave breaks into workers who return and workers who stay; within waves the returning migrants are the low-skill workers. The average skill level of migrants is rising in the order of their wave."