About one-third of elderly Americans age 65 and older supplements their Medicare health insurance in a private insurance market known as the ÒMedigapÓ market. Prices for Medigap policies vary widely, despite the fact that regulations enacted in 1992 standardized all Medigap policies, thereby...

There is tremendous interest in understanding the effects of welfare reform enacted by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. Our interest lies in one possible consequence of welfare reform: the loss of health insurance.This paper advances the literature by...

Nearly 30 percent of Americans age 65 and older supplement their Medicare health insurance through the Medigap private insurance market. We show that prices for Medigap policies vary widely, despite the fact that all plans are standardized, and even after controlling for firm heterogeneity....

Using a work limitation-based measure of disability, researchers have found that the employment of working-age men (aged 21-58) with disabilities fell dramatically relative to such men without disabilities in the United States in the 1990s. Because no such measure of the population with...

Perhaps the single greatest achievement of social policy in the United States over the last three decades has been reducing poverty in old age. The transition from work to retirement is no longer economically perilous for the vast majority of older American workers. For most married couples, the...

This paper, using a sample from the 1973 Social Security Exact Match File, tests the importance of economic factors in the decision of male workers to take social security (OASI) benefits at age 62. Previous studies of this decision have concentrated on the flow of pension benefits available to...

We propose a class of generalised percentile ratios as an alternative to the P90 / P10 ratio for measuring labour earnings inequality. We show that they are more robust to sampling the variation and rounding error prevalent in interview-based surveys, as demonstrated through a Monte Carlo...