2011

The global financial crisis has deeply affected household saving, work, and income patterns. The crisis dealt a heavy blow to investment-based private pensions. The financial implosion, in turn, produced an economic crisis with high unemployment and low earnings. These factors…

Our proposed work has two primary goals. Our first goal is to model the effect that income has on health, health has on income, and the latent productivity in health capital production. Our second contribution will be to use the…

Individual decisions about consumption, saving, and labor supply should be directly linked to subjective expectations about future events. While a rich literature has emerged that examines individuals’ subjective probability expectations, little work has documented how these expectations change over time.…

Many displaced workers suffer near-permanent losses in earning capacity. Recent estimates suggest that job losers from mass-layoff events during the 1982-83 recession, for example, experienced long-term earnings losses of 15% or more. For workers who are age-eligible, one reaction to…

Population aging challenges the solvency of Social Security, which has led to reform proposals intended to increase the labor supply of seniors. The imperative to delay retirements of older workers, however, may be frustrated by continuing age discrimination; conversely, combating…

The HRS is a key data source used to analyze the health and economic status of the middle-aged and older population in the United States and many analyses are specifically interested in the low-income population that is eligible for various…

This project will study biases that differential mortality introduces into cross-sectional or synthetic panel age profiles of consumption, as would be estimated from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. The data for this study will come from the Health and Retirement Study…

The fraction of American adults receiving benefits from the Social Security Disability Insurance program (SSDI) has risen dramatically during the past several decades. A proposed solution to rising caseload costs consists of changing program rules to encourage fully or partially…

This project will investigate two questions. (1.) Do mortgage foreclosure, and inability (or unwillingness) to continue mortgage payments, depend, in a significant fraction of cases, on recessionary unemployment? If so, can they be viewed as arising from short-run problems? Is…