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...

Using four waves of the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) this paper tests whether longevity expectations predict actual mortality at the individual level. The results suggest longevity expectations do predict mortality reasonably well. Serious health shocks and new activity limitations do...

This study investigates whether higher input use per stay in the hospital (treatment intensity) and longer length of stay improve outcomes of care. We allow for endogeneity of intensity and length of stay by estimating a quasi-maximum-likelihood discrete factor model, where the distribution of...

This study investigates the effects of Medicaid and strategic behavior on (1) the probability of entering a nursing home, (2) amounts of formal and informal care provided elderly persons in the community, and (3) asset accumulation. We find that Medicaid subsidies increase the probabilyt of...

This study combines hydrological modeling with applied micro-econometric techniques to value a complex ecosystem service: drought mitigation provided by tropical forested watersheds to agrarian communities. Spatial variation in current baseflow allows estimation of drought mitigation values as...

This survey paper updates what is known about the linkages between demographic change (changes in age distributions, the size and the growth rate of population, and migration) and the capacity of countries to provide food, to reduce poverty, and to maintain their environment. This assessment...

Existing methods for constructing confidence bands for multivatiate impulse response functions depend on auxiliary assumptions on the order of integration of the variables. Thus, they may have poor coverage at long lead times when variables are highly persistent. Solutions that have been...

The use of finite mixture distributions to control for unobserved heterogeneity has become increasingly popular among those estimating dynamic discrete choice models. One of the barriers to using mixture models is that parameters that could previously be estimated in stages must now be estimated...

There are many situations in which buyers have a significant stake in what a firm learns about their demands. Specifically, any time that price discrimination is possible on an individual basis and repeat purchases are likely, buyers possess incentives for strategic manipulation of demand...