There is considerable evidence that minorities are less likely than whites to be covered under employment-based health insurance. In 2001, rates of Hispanic full-time workers were 21 and 15 percentage points lower than those of non-Hispanic white men and women. For policy purposes, understanding...

Demand for employment-based insurance is typically treated as an individual rather than a household decision. Dual-earner households are now the modal U.S. married household, however, and most firms offer family coverage as an option available to employees. Findings from a model estimating...

This paper suggests that pension characteristics are simultaneously determined along with workers' retirement ages. Both the age of pension eligibility and actual retirement age are determined by the productivity and marginal disutility of work, factors that are influenced by worker and job...

I analyze the conditions under which joint liability loans to encourage peer-monitoring would be offered and chosen instead of monitored individual liability alternatives on a competitive loan market when production and monitoring activities are costly and subject to moral hazard. The case for...

This paper shows how a Metropolis-Hastings algorithm with efficient jump can be constructed for the estimation of multiple threshold time series of the U.S. short term interest rates. The results show that interest rates are persistent in a lower regime and exhibit weak mean reversion in the...

We study a labor market in which principals and agents must search for a trading partner, and agents have private information about the value of a match. We show that competitive pressure can induce agents to lie and over-state the value of the match. This leads to insufficient frictional...

This paper applies three different methods widely used in the literature to track changes in shadow economic activity in Georgia following a drastic tax reform in 2005. The first method is a currency demand approach based on macro level data. The second and third methods rely on micro data from...

We develop an estimator of unreported income, perhaps due to tax evasion, that does not depend on as strict identifying assumptions as previous estimators based on microeconomic data. The standard identifying assumption that the self-employed underreport income whereas wage and salary workers do...

Empirical evidence on the relationship between trade liberalization, exchange rates, and tax revenue is mixed. This paper examines these linkages anew. Using a panel of 22 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, over 1980–1996, we perform Generalized Method of Moment regressions to test this...

I propose a simple general equilibrium formalization of Domar's famous hypothesis on the causes of slavery or serfdom that emphasizes the interactions between factor endowments, the nature of the production technologies, and the initial distribution of property rights over land. The model...