Introduction: what have we learned about the problems of and prospects for disadvantaged youth? / Jonathan Gruber -- Education : the behavioral consequences of pre-kindergarten participation for disadvantaged youth / David Figlio and Jeffrey Roth -- Is gaining access to selective elementary...

The effect of vouchers on sorting between private and public schools depends upon the price elasticity of demand for private schooling. Estimating this elasticity is empirically challenging because prices and quantities are jointly determined in the market for private schooling. We exploit a...

The introduction of legalized abortion in the early 1970s led to dramatic changes in fertility behavior. Some research has suggested as well that there were important impacts on cohort outcomes, but this literature has been limited and controversial. In this paper, we provide a framework for...

The Social Security earnings test, a version of which still applies to those ages 62-64, reduces immediate payments to beneficiaries whose labor income exceeds a given threshold. Although benefits are subsequently increased to compensate for any such reduction, the earnings test is typically...

Disability Insurance (DI) is a public program that provides income support to persons unable to continue work due to disability. The difficulty of defining disability, however, has raised the possibility that this program may be subsidizing the early retirement of workers who are not truly...

We consider the role of spousal labor supply as insurance against spells of unemployment. Standard theory suggests that women should work more when their husbands are out of work (the Added Worker Effect or AWE), but there has been little empirical support for this contention. We too find little...

Disability Insurance (DI), which provides income support to disabled workers, has been criticized for inducing a large fall in the labor force participation rate of older workers. We study the effects of one policy response designed to address this moral hazard problem: raising the rate at which...

While National Health Insurance (NHI) plans in the U.S. are often opposed on the basis of their potential disemployment effects, there is no existing evidence on the effects of NHI on employment. We provide such evidence by examining the employment consequences of NHI in Canada, using the fact...

Government backed income contingent student loans are an increasingly being used to fund higher education. An income contingent repayment plan acts as an incremental marginal tax on labor earnings, which could cause individuals to distort their work effort. This paper uses an administrative...