A significant literature has documented trend increases in pain among Americans over the last two or three decades. There is no single explanation seeming to work well for the increase. We show that, rather than resulting from a smooth upward trend, the increase was almost entirely concentrated...

We estimate the trend in the transitory variance of male earnings in the U.S. using the Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1970 to 2004. Using both an error components model as well as simpler but only approximate methods, we find that the transitory variance started to increase in the...

Existing research on the static effects of the manipulation of welfare program benefit parameters on labor supply has allowed only restrictive forms of heterogeneity in preferences. Yet preference heterogeneity implies that the marginal effects of welfare reforms on labor supply may differ in...

As part of a set of papers using the same methods and sample selection criteria to estimate trends in male earnings volatility across a number of survey and administrative datasets, we conduct a new investigation of trends in male earnings volatility from the 1980s to 2014 using data from the...

The possible existence of trends in volatility in the U.S. labor market has been an important issue in both labor economics and macroeconomics. The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) has been the workhorse data set used to estimate trends in earnings volatility at the individual level....

We present new calculations of cumulative marginal tax rates (MTRs) facing low income families participating in multiple welfare programs over the period 1997-2007, the period after 1996 welfare reform but before the program expansions of the Great Recession. Our calculations are for...