Health risk is increasingly viewed as an important form of background risk that affects household portfolio decisions. However, its role might be mediated by the presence of a protective full-coverage National Health System that could reduce households’ probability of incurring current and...

As health care costs continue to rise, medical expenses have become an increasingly important contributor to financial risk. Economic theory suggests that when background risk rises, individuals will reduce their exposure to other risks. This paper presents a test of this theory by examining the...

The authors present the first causal estimates of the effect of Social Security Disability Insurance benefit receipt on labor supply using all program applicants. They use new administrative data to match applications to disability examiners, and exploit variation in examiners' allowance rates...