A positive relationship between socio-economic status (SES) and health, the so-called \health-wealth gradient", is repeatedly found in most industrialized countries with similar levels of health care technology and economic welfare. This study analyzes causality from health to wealth (health...

This paper considers determinants of physical-functional limitations in daily-life activities at high ages. Specifically, we quantify the extent to which the impact of adverse life events on this outcome is larger in case of exposure to adverse economic conditions early in life. Adverse life...

This study examines labour supply responses to spousal sickness absence (SSA) using a Swedish longitudinal panel data, from 1996-2002. The overall results present an evidence of a decrease in labour supply in response to spousal sickness absence. The effect on labour supply increases with...

We use information from Social Security earnings records to examine the accuracy of survey responses regarding participation in tax-deferred pension plans. As employer-provided defined benefit pensions are replaced by voluntary contribution plans, employees’ understanding of the link between...

This paper employs a conditional quantile regression approach to quantify the dynamics of depression among adolescents, and examine the extent of true state dependence in youth depression conditional on unobserved individual heterogeneity and family socio5economic status. We use data on the...

This paper employs a conditional quantile regression approach to examine the roles of family SES, early childhood life-events, unobserved heterogeneity and pure state dependence in explaining the distribution of depression among adolescents and young adults using data on the children of the US...

This report describes preparation of data from the National Long-Term Care Survey (NLTCS) fur use in a dynamic multiple-indicator model of dependency in Activities of Daily Living (ADLs). The data set descrdibed makes use of all functional status information available across four NLTCS waves for...

We use exogenous variation in Social Security payments created by the Social Security benefits notch to estimate how retirees' use of prescription medications responds to changes in their incomes. In contrast to estimates obtained using ordinary least squares, instrumental variables estimates...

The project addresses the discrepancies between recognized disability status and actual health condition of Russians, evaluates the targeting efficiency of disability benefits, and investigates the factors that determine individual behavior leading to inconsistency between the degree of incurred...

This paper reports the first test of how exogenous health shocks impact people's longevity expectations. The analysis exploits the panel structure of the Health and Retirement Study and tests whether smokers, former smokers and those who never smoked react differently to serious, smoking related...