October 2005. New York’s School Tax Relief Program, STAR, provides state-funded property tax relief for homeowners. Like a matching grant, STAR changes the price of public services, thereby altering the incentives of voters and school officials and leading to unintended consequences. Using...

November 2004 (Revised from April 2003). We estimate the incentive effects of income taxation in a life-cycle model of consumption and labor supply that relaxes the standard assumption of strong separability within periods. Our model permits identification of both within-period preference...

October 2001 (Revised from July 2001). Abstract: By supplementing income explicitly through payments or implicitly through taxes collected, income-based taxes and transfers make disposable income less variable. Because disposable income determines consumption, policies that smooth disposable...

In this paper, we develop tests for structural change in cointegrated panel regressions with common and idiosyncratic trends. We consider both the cases of observable and nonobservable common trends, deriving a Functional Central Limit Theorem for the partial sample estimators under the null of...

December 2000 (Revised from September 2000). Background: The economic costs of depression are significant, both the direct medical costs of care and the indirect costs of lost productivity. Empirical studies of antidepressant cost-effectiveness suggest that the use of selective serotonin...

June 2005 (Revised from May 2002 and February 2003). We investigate the effect of initial provider (primary care physician, psychiatrist, or non-physician mental health specialist) on the adequacy of subsequent treatment for persons with depression. Our data are from MarketScan®, a medical and...

There are thousands of studies on the gay and lesbian population. Because of the difficulty of sampling this population, most studies have used "convenience samples" for analysis. Until recently, it was extremely rare that survey data on gays and lesbians were collected from a known sampling...

Most of my research at Yale University School of Medicine over the past several years has focused on identifying older adults at risk of functional decline and disability, identifying events that may precipitate the transition from functional independence to disability, and developing strategies...

Palliative care is specialized healthcare for anyone who is diagnosed with a serious and life-threatening illness, starting when they get the diagnosis, regardless of the prognosis. Although hospice is a form of palliative care, most palliative care is not end-of-life care or hospice, a common...

December 2002 (Revised from October 2002). Depression is a condition with various modes of treatment, including pharmacotherapy, psychotherapy, and some combination of each. The role of psychotherapy in the treatment of depression relative to the role of pharmacotherapy is not well understood,...