"I want to break free". The role of working conditions on retirement expectations and decisions.

We investigate the role of working conditions on the desire to retire as soon as possible and on the probability of transition from employment to either full or partial retirement, using different measures of work quality. We find that low work quality strongly correlates with the desire to retire as soon as possible of "young-old" workers. This might be explained by the deterioration of employer-employee match with age due to reduced incentives for firms to invest in training and work practises that enhance workability of their senior workers. When we move from intentions to decisions, the role of work quality is less clear-cut and it mainly plays a role in the transitions from employment to full retirement.

The direct impact of maternity benefits on leave taking: Evidence from complete fertility histories.

Maternity leave policies have important effects on several labour market outcomes of women, and are specifically designed to reduce gender differences in the various dimensions of working life and to contrast the negative consequence of fertility decisions. By making use of a unique data set which contains complete work and fertility histories for different European countries, combined with features of maternity leave schemes across countries and over time, we look at the effect of maternity leave benefits on job interruptions after each successive childbirth. The main result of the paper is that maternity leave legislation in Europe effectively increases job protection and female labour market attachment: a more generous paid maternity leave increases the number of weeks employed but not at work, but reduces the number of weeks spent out of the labour market.

Life insurance investment and stock market participation in Europe.

In most European countries life insurance has played a key role in household portfolios, to the extent that it has often been the first asset ever purchased. In this paper we use life history data from a host of European countries to investigate the role of life insurance investment in shaping individuals' attitudes towards participation in stocks and mutual funds. We show that individuals who purchased a life insurance policy are more likely to invest in stocks and mutual funds later. On the one hand, these findings support the notion that life insurance policies play an educational role in financial investment. On the other hand, they are also consistent with behavioural models where economic agents are first concerned with avoiding unacceptable adverse scenarios by purchasing low risk investments, such as life insurance policies, and then invest in riskier assets, such as stocks and mutual funds, to obtain higher economic returns.