This paper explores the role of marriage when markets are incomplete so that individuals cannot diversify their idiosyncratic labor income risk. Ceteris paribus, an individual would prefer to marry a hedge (i.e. a spouse whose income is negatively correlated with her own) as it raises her...

Yes, subject to concerns about Medicare inefficiencies and potentially self-confirming skepticism. The U.S. social security system-broadly defined to include Medicare-faces significant financial problems as the result of an aging population. But demographic change is also likely to raise...

In a model on population and endogenous technological change, Kremer combines a short-run Malthusian scenario where income determines the population that can be sustained, with the Boserupian insight that greater population spurs technological change and can therefore lift a country out of its...

This paper explores how EU countries can address various challenges (including the aging of the population) affecting their systems of old-age income support. It presents two scenarios illustrating the most important uncertainties surrounding the major developments that affect the pension...

This paper studies within-family decision making regarding investment in income protection for surviving spouses. A change in US pension law (the Retirement Equity Act of 1984) is used as an instrument to derive predictions both from a simple Nash-bargaining model of the household and from the...

Applied work often studies the effect of a binary variable (“treatment”) using linear models with additive effects. I study the interpretation of the OLS estimands in such models when treatment effects are heterogeneous. I show that the treatment coefficient is a convex combination of two...

We empirically investigate the existence of spatial autocorrelation between military dictatorships in Sub-Saharan Africa from 1977 through 2007. We apply a Bayesian SAR probit regression, extended to a pooled model. We find a robust and positive spatial autocorrelation coefficient, which shows a...

This paper investigates whether national evaluation of decentralised government performance tends, by lessening local information spill-overs, to reduce the scope for local performance comparisons and consequently to lower the extent of spatial auto-correlation among local government...

A growing number of American states require that students who do not demonstrate basic reading proficiency at the end of third grade be retained and provided with remedial services. We exploit a discontinuity in the probability of third grade retention under Floridaś test-based promotion policy...

This paper develops a unified framework for fixed and random effects estimation of higher-order spatial autoregressive panel data models with spatial autoregressive disturbances and heteroskedasticity of unknown form in the idiosyncratic error component. We derive the moment conditions and...