Public opinion influences politicians, and therefore influences public policy decisions. What are the roles of self-interest, knowledge, and ideology in public opinion formation? And how do people learn about economic issues? Using a new, specially-designed survey, we find that most respondents...

The paper is an empirical cross-section study of the retirement decisions of American white men between the ages of 58 and 67. predicated on the theoretical notion that an individual retires when his reservation wage exceeds his market wage. Reservation wages are derived from an explicit utility...

This paper provides evidence on the behavior of reservation wages over the spell of unemployment using high-frequency longitudinal data. Using data from our survey of unemployed workers in New Jersey, where workers were interviewed each week for up to 24 weeks, we find that self-reported...