Immediately following a minimum wage hike, household income rises on average by about $250 per quarter and spending by roughly $700 per quarter for households with minimum wage workers. Most of the spending response is caused by a small number of households who purchase vehicles. Furthermore, we...

This paper exploits the effectively random assignment of judges to Disability Insurance cases to estimate the causal impact of Disability Insurance receipt on labor supply. We find that benefit receipt reduces labor force participation by 26 percentage points three years after a disability...

The old age provisions of the Medicaid program were designed to insure poor retirees against medical expenses. However, it is the rich who are most likely to live long and face expensive medical conditions when very old. We estimate a rich structural model of savings and endogenous medical...

This paper constructs a rich model of saving for retired single people. Our framework allows for bequest motives and heterogeneity in medical expenses and life expectancies. We estimate the model using AHEAD data and the method of simulated moments. The data show that out-of-pocket medical...

Rich people, women, and healthy people live longer. We document that this heterogeneity in life expectancy is large, and we use an estimated structural model to assess its effect on the elderly's saving. We find that the differences in life expectancy related to observable factors such as...

Using data from the Health and Retirement Survey and the Assets and Health Dynamics of the Oldest Old survey, we estimate the stochastic process that determines both the distribution and dynamics of health care costs. We find that the data-generating process for log health costs is well...