Labor economists have been active students of the life cycle of market work and non-market time (such as training, and other non-market time—such as leisure, retirement and housework). This life cycle research has been studied for decades both theoretically and empirically. Theoretical work and empirical relationships and literally thousands of papers using this empirical estimation approach with both cross sectional and panel data are remarkably robust. The theoretical and empirical results align in important ways with recent work in neuroscience as discussed below.
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