Recent years have witnessed increased interest in issues of inequality and mobility in the labor market. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the German Socio-Economic Panel, we compare the labor earnings mobility of prime age men and women in the United States and Germany...

The authors investigate the degree to which "creaming"-nonrandom selection of participants-in Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) Title II-A programs is responsible for the high placement rates in those programs. An analysis of data from Tennessee JTPA agencies, in conjunction with Current...

Analyzing data from the Retirement History Study, the authors find that the retirement plans of male workers aged 58-63 in 1969 were significantly affected by unanticipated events over the next decade. Specifically, unanticipated increases in Social Security wealth induced retirement earlier...

Traditional cross-sectional measures find greater inequality in the United States than in industrialized Western European countries, but are unable to distinguish transitory from permanent inequality. With longitudinal data, we measure cross-sectional inequality during the 1980s using the...

This paper analyzes the importance of policy variables in the context of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) application timing decision. Previously, we explicitly modeled the optimal timing of SSDI application using dynamic structural models. We estimated these models using data from...

We use monthly data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation and the Current Population Survey to estimate the effect of the minimum wage. Minimum wage increases significantly reduce the employment of the most vulnerable groups in the working-age population—young adults without a...

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Government policies attempt to mitigate the economic risks to households of major life transitions. This paper focuses on two such transitions that social security systems typically insure against—long term exits from the labor market (retirement, disability, unemployment insurance) and the...

Between the early 1980s and 2002, both the prevalence of obesity and the number of beneficiaries of the Social Security Disability Insurance program doubled. We test whether these trends are related; specifically, we test whether obesity causes disability and movement onto the disability rolls. We...