Heterogeneity in Family Life Course Patterns and Intra-Cohort Wealth Disparities in Late Working Age

European Journal of Population - Considering soaring wealth inequalities in older age, this research addresses the relationship between family life courses and widening wealth differences between...     

Reworking Postfordism: Labor Process Versus Employment Relations

The Fordism/postfordism framework has been widely used, but also heavily criticized, in the social sciences. I outline the central points of debate over the use of this framework for analysis of work organization, including the range of models offered as successors to Fordism. I then suggest that, while some criticisms of the concept of postfordism have highlighted important problems and issues, the Fordist/postfordist framework can be elaborated as an analytically coherent, theoretically illuminating approach to the historical, institutional, and comparative analysis of work and employment. Although researchers appear to be using the concept of postfordism increasingly less frequently over the last decade, I argue that it provides a unifying framework within which to analyze work and employment relations in the current phase of capitalism, which is characterized by an apparent variety of new organizational forms within a broader context of increasing disconnectedness of economic institutions. Lean production has become established as the predominant postfordist labor process, widespread in manufacturing but also increasingly being implemented in services. However, this must be distinguished from a broader set of changes in employment relations.     

Time preference and labour migration in an OLG model with land and capital

This paper constructs a two-country migration model in the lines of Galor (1986), in which the world population consists of individuals of two types who have different time preferences. Production uses three inputs: mobile labour, immobile capital and land. It is shown that both countries are necessarily inhabited by agents of both types and exhibit equal density of population and equal interest rate at the steady state equilibrium of the integrated economy. The steady state welfare implications of international labour migration are studied.This paper has been written during Philippe Michel's visit at CORE, September 1994. Earlier drafts of this paper have been presented at the meeting Journées d'étude générations imbriquées (Marseille, November 24–26, 1994), at the ESPE conference (Lisbon, June 1–3, 1995) and at the EEA annual meeting (Prag, September 1–3, 1995). Comments by participants are gratefully acknowledged. We are also grateful to Stéphane Déo, Kamhon Kan, Pierre Pestieau, Christoph Schmidt and two anonymous referees for helpful comments. The usual disclaimer applies.Responsible editor: Alessandro Cigno     

Private versus public financing of education and endogenous growth

This paper examines interactions between education policy and growth. The analysis is carried out in an OLG model with two types of individuals: skilled and unskilled. An increase in public education reduces private costs of education, increases the proportion of skilled individuals, and tends to promote growth. On the other hand, education spending crowds out physical capital and reduces learning-by-doing. A marginal increase in the education subsidy can lower growth. It is yet shown that pure public education maximizes the long-run growth rate. Importantly, a partial subsidy to education can result in lower growth than pure private education. Received: 7 March 1999/Accepted: 25 November 1999