Motivated by debates about welfare state retrenchment and growing economic insecurity, this book takes a closer look at the situation of older workers in Germany and the US. It first provides an in-depth account of country differences in key social programs - and of crucial changes since the...

We study the short-run effect of involuntary job loss on comprehensive measures of public health costs. We focus on job loss induced by plant closure, thereby addressing the reverse causality problem of deteriorating health leading to job loss as job displacements due to plant closure are...

The contribution of cigarette smoking to national health expenditures is thought to be large, but our current understanding of the effect of smoking on annual medical expenditures is limited to studies that use cross-sectional data to make comparisons of medical care expenditures between smokers...