Policy-makers have argued that providing public health insurance coverage to the uninsured lowers long-run costs by reducing the need for expensive hospitalizations and emergency department visits later in life. In this paper, we provide evidence for such a phenomenon by exploiting a legislated...

This paper considers the long-run patterns of poverty in the United States from the early 1960s to 2010. Our results contradict previous studies that have argued that poverty has shown little improvement over time or that anti-poverty efforts have been ineffective. We find that moving from...

Using longitudinal data for 1968-2009 for male household heads, we determine the prevalence of pre- retirement age disability and its association with a wide range of outcomes, including earnings, income, and consumption. We then employ some of these quantities in the optimal social insurance...

While measurement error in the dependent variable does not lead to bias in some well-known cases, with a binary dependent variable the bias can be pronounced. In binary choice, Hausman, Abrevaya and Scott-Morton (1998) show that the marginal effects in the observed data differ from the true ones...

This paper uses the natural experiment provided by periodic increases in state benefit levels to estimate the effects of higher unemployment insurance benefits, individuals who filed just before and just after sixteen benefit increases are compared using data from five states during 1979-1984....

This chapter examines the labor supply effects of social insurance programs. We argue that this topic deserves separate treatment from the rest of the labor supply literature because individuals may be imperfectly informed as to the rules of the programs and because key parameters are likely to...

High rates of understatement are found for many government transfer programs and in many datasets. This understatement has major implications for our understanding of economic well-being and the effects of transfer programs. We provide estimates of the extent of under-reporting for ten transfer...

Black entrepreneurship has been unsuccessful in the U.S. The fraction of employed blacks that work in their own businesses is about one-third that of whites. Other measures of success such as net income, number of employees, and form of organization show large differences between blacks and...

We first critique the manner in which work costs have been introduced into labor supply estimation, and note the difficulty of incorporating a realistic rendering of the costs of work. We then show that, if work costs are not accounted for in the budget and time constraints in a structural labor...

Previous studies tend to find that immigration has a weak negative effect on the employment and earnings of native-born workers. These studies overlook the effect of immigration on an important sector of the labor force, the self- employed. Anecdotal evidence suggests that immigrants, especially...