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...

A critical question for Social Security policy is how program incentives affect retirement behavior. We use the wealth of new data available through the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) to examine the impact of Social Security incentives on male retirement. We implement forward-looking models...

Government transfers to older persons in Canada are one of the largest and fastest growing" components of the government budget. I provide an overview of the interaction between these" transfer programs and retirement behavior. I begin by documenting historical trends in labor force"...

The largest entitlement program in the United States today is the Social Security program (SS). We provide an overview of the interaction between the SS system and retirement behavior. We begin by documenting historical trends in labor force participation and program receipt, and contemporaneous...

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...

The reaction of foreign stocks to cross-listing events has been documented in an extensive literature, finding that the betas of these stocks change over time. In this paper, I use stock return data for foreign companies listed on U.S. exchanges to ask whether the betas changed at all and, if...

International consumption risk sharing studies have largely ignored their models' counterfactual implications for asset returns although these returns incorporate direct market measures of risk. In this paper, we modify a canonical risk-sharing model to generate more plausible asset return...

Financial markets have become increasingly global in recent decades, yet the pricing of internationally traded assets continues to depend strongly upon local risk factors, leading to several observations that are difficult to explain with standard frameworks. Equity returns depend upon both...