Pensions and age specific death rates are intertwined in several ways. Pensions provide a mechanism to remove the uncertainty about date of death from consumption planning. Age specific death rates determine the cost and value of pensions. In this paper, we use the Retirement History Survey to...

in this paper we specify and estimate a structural limited dependent variable model with which we study both the health and retirement status of the elderly. Standard linear estimators, which assume that these variable sare continuous, are not appropriate and categorical estimation techniques...

Inequality in income or earnings is the most indisputable fact about the distribution of income. Inequality in income distribution occurs in most political and economic models and has from ancient times to the modern era. Society and government have expressed a desire to establish a minimum...

In 1974 the federal government instituted Supplemental Social Insurance(SSI). The eligible group was the elderly on welfare and disabled individuals.The program distributed extra income and made people eligible for Medicaid in all states except Arizona which did not have Medicaid. We used...

In this paper we use data from the Retirement History Survey (RHS) to examine the relationship of some sociodemographic and economic variables to morbidity and mortality. Since the RHS is a longitudinal survey, we are able to study current health conditioned on prior health as well as the more...

This paper tests some empirical implications of the general human capital model's explanation of rising wage profiles. At the individual level, the model implies that there will be a negative relationship between the initial wage level and wage growth of young, inexperienced workers. At the...

We look at the effects of rainfall forecasts and realized rainfall on equilibrium agricultural wages over the course of the agricultural production cycle. We show theoretically that a forecast of good weather can lower wages in the planting stage, by lowering ex ante out-migration, and can...

This paper widens the scope of the emerging literature on economic networks by assessing the role of caste networks in Indian local politics. We test the hypothesis that these networks can discipline their members to overcome political commitment problems, enabling communities to select their...

We estimate the general-equilibrium labor market effects of a large-scale randomized intervention in which we designed and marketed a rainfall index insurance product across three states in India. Marketing agricultural insurance to both cultivators and to agricultural wage laborers allows us to...

We use unique data characterizing individual savings for twins and non-twins in urban China to examine why the savings rates of the young are elevated relative to the middle-aged, despite rising individual life-cycle incomes. We show that inter-generational co-residence masks the true life-cycle...