In this paper, we provide estimates of welfare benefit effects on a set of behaviors that includes welfare participation, fertility, marriage, work and schooling using approximations to the decision rules that would be derived from an explicit dynamic optimization problem. The estimates are...

A strong positive association between one's school attainment and that of one's parents has been consistently documented in numerous empirical studies. The underlying cause of this intergenerational correlation has been the subject of contentious debate in the social sciences for many years. Two...

Opportunities for external validation of behavioral models in the social sciences that are based on randomized social experiments or on large regime shifts, that can be treated as experiments for the purpose of model validation, are extremely rare. In this paper, we consider an alternative...

We provide strong evidence of advantageous selection in the Medigap insurance market, and analyze its sources. Using Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS) data, we find that, conditional on controls for the price of Medigap, medical expenditures for senior citizens with Medigap coverage...

We provide strong evidence of advantageous selection in the Medigap insurance market, and analyze its sources. Using Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS) data, we find that, conditional on controls for the price of Medigap, medical expenditures for senior citizens with Medigap coverage...

This paper develops generalized method-of-moments tests for the rationality of earnings per share forecasts made by individual stock analysts. We fail to reject the hypothesis of rationality as long as we take into account two complications: (1) the correlation in a given period of analysts'...

The development over the past 25 years of methods for the estimation of discrete choice dynamic programming (DCDP) models opened up new frontiers for empirical research in a host of areas, including labor economics, industrial organization, economic demography, health economics, development...

Using data from the NLSY79, we structurally estimate a dynamic model of the life cycle decisions of young women. The women make joint and sequential decisions about school attendance, work, marriage, fertility and welfare participation. We use the model to perform a set of counterfactual...