While increased life expectancy in the U.S. has been used as justification for raising the Social Security retirement ages, independent researchers have reported that life expectancy declined in recent decades for white women with less than a high school education. However, there has been a...

Determining whether population dynamics provide competing explanations to place effects for observed geographic patterns of population health is critical for understanding health inequality. We focus on the working-age population where health disparities are greatest and analyze detailed data on...

Investigators of social differentials in health outcomes commonly augment incomplete micro data by appending socioeconomic characteristics of residential areas (such as median income in a zip code) to proxy for individual characteristics. However, little empirical attention has been paid to how...

We estimate the impact of fertility-timing on the chances that children in poor urban African American communities will have surviving and able-bodied parents until maturity. To do so, we use census and vital statistics data to compute age- and sex-specific rates of mortality and functional...

Since the mid-1980s there has been dramatic growth in the number and fraction of DI and SSI beneficiaries with mental illness. With longer life expectancies and younger ages of disability onset than beneficiaries with physical impairments, their growth exerts added fiscal pressure on the...

The authors use trends in self-reported disability to gauge the impact of the growth of disability transfer programs on the labor force attachment of older working-aged men. The authors' tabulations suggest that between 1949 and 1987, about half of the 4.9 percentage point drop in the labor...

In this paper, we specify a dynamic programming model that addresses the interplay among health, financial resources, and the labor market behavior of men in the later part of their working lives. Unlike previous work which has typically used self reported health or disability status as a proxy...

We estimate the magnitude of any direct effect of retirement on health. Since retirement is endogenous to heath, it is not possible to estimate this effect by comparing the health of individuals before and after they retire. As an alternative we use institutional features of the pension system...

We specify a dynamic programming model that addresses the interplay among health, financial resources, and the labor market behavior of men late in their working lives. We model health as a latent variable, for which self-reported disability status is an indicator, and allow self-reported...