While the health risks associated with smoking are well known, the impact on income distributions is not. This paper extends the literature by examining the distributional effects of a behavioral choice, in this case smoking, on net marginal Social Security tax rates (NMSSTR). The results show...

Substantial racial disparities continue to persist in the prevalence of preterm births and lowbirth-weight births. Health policy aimed at reducing these disparities could be better targeted if the differences in birth outcomes are better understood. This study decomposes these racial disparities...

The goal of this research is to quantify the association between food insecurity and smoking among low-income families. This analysis is a retrospective study using data from the 2001 Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a longitudinal study of a representative sample of U.S. men, women, and children...

The objective of the paper is to estimate the effect of physician bonus eligibility on CRC screening while controlling for patient and primary care physician characteristics. The study is retrospective, using a managed care plan’s claims data on fifty-year-old commercially insured patients in...

This paper extends the literature on net marginal tax rates created by the Social Security program by including variations in both the probability of being eligible to receive benefits and income-related life expectancy. The previous literature has found that women incur a lower net marginal tax...

We develop, apply, and test a new measure of the marriage tax: the reduction in future spending from getting married. Our measure is a comprehensive, actuarial (expected) present value. It incorporates all major and most minor US tax and benefit programs, weighing the present value of additional...

This paper develops a simple approach to overcome the shortcomings of using a standard, single treatment-effect event study to assess the ability of an empirical model to measure heterogeneous treatment effects. Equally as important, we discuss how the standard errors reported in a typical...

Using the Health and Retirement Survey and standard wage decomposition techniques, this paper finds that the difference in intermittent labor force participation between men and women accounts for 47 percent of the contribution to the wage gap of differences in observed characteristics. Not...

This paper uses matched individual-level data from the Current Population Survey to determine that around the 2008 recession, there was a significant upward shift in trend of the share of labor force leavers giving Schooling and Other as the reason for absence from the labor market. This trend...

Recent trends in the labor force participation of women have brought much public attention to the issue of women opting out. This paper explores the decision of working women to exit the labor market at a time of major transition - the birth of a child - utilizing linked vital statistics,...