Little is known about the degree to which individuals are uncertain about their future Social Security benefits, how this varies within the U.S. population, and whether this uncertainty influences financial decisions related to retirement planning. To illuminate these issues, the authors present...

Many economic applications have found quantile models useful when the explanatory variables may have varying impacts throughout the distribution of the outcome variable. Traditional quantile estimators provide conditional quantile treatment effects. Typically, we are interested in unconditional...

This paper presents a theory of the demand for health, health investment and longevity, building on the human capital framework for health and addressing limitations of existing models. It predicts a negative correlation between health investment and health, that the health of wealthy and...

Self-reported work disability is analyzed in the US and The Netherlands. The raw data show that Dutch respondents much more often report that they have a work limiting health problem than respondents in the US. The difference remains when controlling for demographic characteristics and observed...

The authors use the increases in health insurance coverage at age 65 generated by the rules of the Medicare program to evaluate the effects of health insurance coverage on health related behaviors and outcomes. The rise in overall coverage at age 65 is accompanied by a narrowing of disparities...

Understanding of the substantial disparity in health between low and high socioeconomic status (SES) groups is hampered by the lack of a sufficiently comprehensive theoretical framework to interpret empirical facts and to predict yet untested relations. The authors present a life-cycle model...

To analyze the effect of health on work, many studies use a simple self-assessed health measure based upon a question such as "do you have an impairment or health problem limiting the kind or amount of work you can do?" A possible drawback of such a measure is the possibility that different...

Some studies suggest that people can maintain their cognitive abilities through "mental exercise." This has not been unequivocally proven. Retirement is associated with a large change in a person's daily routine and environment. In this paper, the authors propose two mechanisms how retirement...

Recall bias is a pervasive problem in the analysis of retrospective data (Shyrock et al., 1973; Ewbank, 1981). The problem is a recurrent concernin the litterature on the determinants of breastfeeding duration, its trend over time, and the effect of breastfeeding on infant mortality.