Empirical analysis often raises questions of approximation to underlying individual behavior. Closer approximation may require more complex statistical specifications, On the other hand, more complex specifications may presume computational facility that is beyond the grasp of most real people...

One popular explanation for this low rate of employee coverage is the presence of numerous state regulations which mandate that group health insurance plans must include certain benefits. By raising the minimum costs of providing any health insurance coverage, these mandated benefits make it...

The paper considers the effect on widows' poverty of changes in Social Security survivorship benefits, by a reduction in couples' benefits so that total Social Security cost is unchanged. A twenty percent increase in survivorship benefits, for example, would reduce the 1989 poverty rate of...

Saving through private pensions has been an important complement to Social Security in providing for the financial needs of older Americans. In the past twenty five years, however, there has been a dramatic change in private retirement saving. Personal retirement accounts have replaced defined...

While there has been considerable research on the disincentive effects of cash welfare under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, there is little evidence on the benefits of the program for single mothers and their children. One potential benefit of this program is that it...

A critical question for Social Security policy is how program incentives affect retirement behavior. We use the wealth of new data available through the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) to examine the impact of Social Security incentives on male retirement. We implement forward-looking models...

We verify that widows are much more likely than couples to be poor and that they make up a large proportion of the poor elderly; 80 percent are widows or other single individuals. Then we seek to explain why the single elderly are poor, with emphasis on widows. We do this by tracing back over...

Politicians have generally two motives: they wish to hold office as long as possible and wish to implement their preferred policies. Thus they face a trade-off between the policies which maximize their choices of reelection and their most preferred policies (or the policies most preferred by the...

A fiscal program that redistributes income from rich to poor individuals indirectly redistributes tax revenues from regions hit by a favorable shock to regions hit by an unfavorable one. Centralized fiscal redistribution has therefore been advocated as a way to insure individuals against...

The purpose of this paper is to test for evidence of opportunistic "political business cycles" in a large sample of 18 OECD economies. Our results can be summarized as follows: 1) We find very little evidence of pre-electoral effects of economic outcomes, in particular, on GDP growth and...