The primary objective of this paper is to improve our understanding of the historic relationship between state and national macroeconomic climate and the health insurance coverage of Americans. The secondary objective of this paper is to use the historic findings to estimate how the number of...

This paper demonstrates gender differences in risk aversion and ambiguity aversion. It also contributes to a growing literature relating economic preference parameters to psychological measures by asking whether variations in preference parameters among persons, and in particular across genders,...

This paper begins the synthesis of two currently unrelated literatures: the human capital approach to health economics and the economics of cognitive and noncognitive skill formation. A lifecycle investment framework is the foundation for understanding the origins of human inequality and for...

This paper examines the contribution of the rise in the return to ability to the rise in the economic return to education. All of the evidence on this question comes from panel data sets in which a small collection of adjacent birth cohorts is followed over time. The structure of the data...

This paper presents new evidence from the NLSY on the importance of meritocracy in American society. In it, we find that general intelligence, or g -- a measure of cognitive ability--is dominant in explaining test score variance. The weights assigned to tests by g are similar for all major...

One current educational reform seeks to reward the "value added" by teachers and schools based on the average change in pupil test scores over time. In this paper, we outline the conditions under which the average change in scores is sufficient to rank schools in terms of value added. A key...