Many companies have defined-contribution benefit plans requiring employees to pay the full cost (before taxes) of more generous health insurance choices. Research has shown that employee decisions are quite responsive to these arrangements. What is less clear is how the total compensation...

If the expenditure of resources in childhood affects the outcomes in adulthood, the adult distribution of education and incomes will depend at least partially on investments made in childhood. There is considerable variation in the amount of parental inputs children of various socio-economic...

An essential feature of schooling is not only that it occurs in a different site than most on-the-job training but also that it is more intensive. That is, a smaller proportion of gross potential earnings is sacrificed in on-the-job training than in schooling. In estimating human capital...

This paper examines how compensation packages change when health insurance premiums rise. We use data on employee choices within a single large firm with a flexible benefits plan; an increasingly common arrangement among medium and large firms. In these companies, employees explicitly choose how...

The amount of time married women spend in workforce has increased dramatically in the last thirty years. This increase in labor force participation has been accompanied by changes in allocation of time to various activities in the household as well. Since the proportion of women in the labor...

Data on health care expenditures, length of stay, utilization of health services, consumption of unhealthy commodities, etc. are typically characterized by: (a) nonnegative outcomes; (b) nontrivial fractions of zero outcomes in the population (and sample); and (c) positively-skewed distributions...

There are two broad classes of models used to address the econometric problems caused by skewness in data commonly encountered in health care applications: (1) transformation to deal with skewness (e.g., OLS on ln(y)); and (2) alternative weighting approaches based on exponential conditional...

We study how the trajectory of health for the near-elderly uninsured changes upon enrolling into Medicare at the age of 65. We find that Medicare increases the probability of the previously uninsured having excellent or very good health, decreases their probability of being in good health, and...

Under the assumption of no unmeasured confounders, a large literature exists on methods that can be used to estimating average treatment effects (ATE) from observational data and that spans regression models, propensity score adjustments using stratification, weighting or regression and even the...

We ascertain the degree of service-level selection in Medicare Advantage (MA) using individual level data on the 100 most frequent HCC's or combination of HCC's from two national insurers in 2012-2013. We find differences in the distribution of beneficiaries across HCC's between TM and MA,...