The use of subjective health measures in empirical models of labour supply and retirement decisions has frequently been criticized. Responses to questions concerning health may be biased due to financial incentives and the willingness to conform to social rules. The eligibility conditions for some social security allowances, notably Disability Insurance benefits, are contingent upon bad health. Even if the decision to apply for a disability allowance is to some extent motivated by financial considerations or a relatively strong preference for leisure, respondents will be inclined to play down these motives and emphasize the importance of their health condition. As a consequence, reporting errors may depend on the labour market status of the respondent and self-reported health variables will be endogenous in labour supply and retirement models. The objective of this paper is to assess the importance of state dependent reporting errors in survey responses and to propose and estimate a model that can be used to account for this kind of systematic mis-reporting. The estimation results indicate that among respondents receiving Disability Allowance, reporting errors are large and systematic. Using such subjective health measures in retirement models may therefore seriously bias the parameter estimates and the conclusions drawn from these.

SUMMARYThis paper explores the interrelation between health and work decisions of older workers. For this, two issues are of relevance. Firstly, health and work may be endogenously related because of direct causal effects of health on work and vice versa, and because of unobservables that may affect both observed health and work outcomes. Secondly, social surveys usually contain self-assessed health measures and research indicates that these may be subject to endogenous, state-dependent reporting bias. A solution to the 'Health and Retirement Nexus' therefore requires an integrated model for work decisions, health production and health reporting mechanisms. We formulate such a model and estimate it on a longitudinal dataset of older Dutch males.

This paper aims to assess empirically the relative size of incentive effects and health for the retirement decision. We specify and estimate a dynamic model for retirement behaviour that explicitly takes account of eligibility conditions and replacement rates of alternative exit routes from the labour force, and health. A range of health instruments are constructed from estimates of a model for health dynamics and these are used to assess the effect of reporting errors and of endogeneity of health on the estimates of the retirement model. Our results provide evidence that health and retirement are endogenously related. Health matters but the size of the health effect depends crucially on the health measure used. We find that subjective health measures overstate the effect of health on retirement and that endogeneity of health suppresses the health effect. Incentive effects are relatively insensitive to alternative specifications for health. The incentive effects are strong for Early Retirement schemes. There is evidence that income streams in alternative exit routes are compared in the retirement decision and that alternative exit routes act as substitutes.

This paper uses information from a panel of Dutch firms to investigate the labor productivity effects of performance related pay (PRP). We find that PRP increases productivity at the firm level with 9% and employment growth with 5%.

We consider a class of household production models characterized by a dichotomy property. In these models the amount of time spent on household production does not depend on the household utility function, conditional on household members having a paid job. We analyse the (non-parametric) identifiability of the production function and the so-called jointness function (a function describing which part of household production time is counted as pure leisure). It is shown that the models are identified in the two-adult case, but not in the single-adult case. We present an empirical application to Swedish time-allocation data. The estimates satisfy regularity conditions that were violated in previous studies and pass various specification tests. For this data set we find that male and female home production time are q-substitutes. Contract/grant sponsor: Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). 1 The value of the output of home production can be estimated by the total value of the production factors used (input approach). Normally, however, we do not have information about all of these inputs (e.g. auxiliary goods). But even if we could measure all the input quantities, this approach would systematically ignore any returns to scale and therefore the value added in home production. Fitzgerald et al. (1996) evaluated the value of home production by measuring output in physical units and attributing market prices to them (output approach.) Since households choose not to purchase these market alternatives, this approach only provides an upper bound to the value of home production. 2 In a recent theoretical analysis Apps and Rees (1997) and Chiappori (1997) stress the importance of household production in analysing intrahousehold behaviour.

Using the European Establishment Survey of Working Times, we derive a typology of firms based on the mix of flexible working time practices they employ. Six flexibility profiles are distinguished, each representing a considerable proportion of establishments. The typology not only differentiates between more and less flexible firms, but also between the focus of the practices firms adopt, stressing that flexibility is not a one-dimensional concept. We also investigate what firm characteristics are good predictors of the adoption of a certain flexibility profile and how the profiles are related to performance and perceived HRM bottlenecks.

SUMMARYWe focus on aspects of health changes, the importance of cohort effects, age related health changes and the effect of labour market status and work history on health. We moreover assess the relative importance of gradual changes and sudden shocks in health changes and the role of work status on the likelihood of experiencing a health shock. A fixed effect panel data model is estimated on two waves of a survey of Dutch elderly. We find strong differences in health outcomes for different age cohorts and gender. We also find that health deteriorates with employment and labour market history. ©

No abstract