Projects

The COVID-19 pandemic has had enormous effects on the United States labor market, disproportionately affecting women’s careers. In this project, we will use survey data collected before and during the pandemic to (1) analyze the impacts of the pandemic and…

We investigate the extent to which out-of-pocket (OOP) medical expenditures replace other types of spending and their role in households’ experiencing financial hardship at older ages. We will begin by documenting trends in out-of-pocked (OOP) medical expenditure risk in the…

The literature on the United States’ wealth inequality has three major shortcomings. First, the literature is focused on wealth concentration at the very top, ignoring differentials across most of the wealth distribution. Second, the literature mostly ignores the wealth differentials…

When Social Security survivor benefits exceed a surviving spouse’s own retired-worker benefits, it helps keep many surviving spouses out of poverty. Yet, access to survivor benefits differs by race by virtue of differences in marital histories, as well as in…

In this work, we will draw on existing surveys about Social Security knowledge to identify areas where knowledge differs across racial and ethnic groups. (We will also draw on a past MRDRC project, UM18-05, conducted by Katherine Carman.) We will…

We will estimate the long run impacts of health on employment by gender, education, and race in the United States and United Kingdom. Our structural framework allows us to disentangle employment drivers such as preferences, productivity, and benefit eligibility. We…

Imperfect knowledge of public programs influences take-up and can lead to suboptimal decisions. This project will quantify differences in Social Security program knowledge across race and ethnic groups. We will then estimate the relationship between these knowledge differences and observed…

Accommodations improve the employment outcomes of people with disabilities, although there are racial (and possibly ethnic) disparities in accommodation receipt. This project will investigate the effect of occupation, industry, and other factors on these disparities.

Growing United States income inequality and the increasing aging of Black and Hispanic populations point to greater risks of financial insecurity for older populations in coming years. Research on retirement determinants for Blacks and Hispanics is limited. We propose to…

This project builds on our current work examining how the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has affected Americans’ financial well-being by using existing and soon to be collected data from the Understanding America Study (UAS). Our analysis will shed light on (1)…