In this paper we study the social, demographic and economic origins of social security. The data for the U.S. and for a cross section of countries make it clear that urbanization and industrialization are strongly associated with the rise of social insurance. We describe a model economy in which...

"Mirroring the railroad industry of the 1940's and 1950's, the trucking industry today appears to be achieving impressive productivity gains. But it is easy to confuse true productivity advances in transportation industries with changes in ton-miles per unit of input that are due simply to...

Societies socialize children about many things, including sex. Socialization is costly. It uses scarce resources, such as time and effort. Parents weigh the marginal gains from socialization against its costs. Those at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale indoctrinate their daughters less...

The Truckers and Turnover Project is a statistical case study of a single firm and its employees which matches proprietary personnel and operational data to new data collected by the researchers to create a two-year panel study of a large subset of new hires. The project's most distinctive...

Trait-based personality psychology and economics have taken different approaches to understanding individual differences, with the former emphasizing variables derived from the factor analysis of trait assessments, and the latter emphasizing variables derived from formal decision theory. In a...

While at least a dozen state legislatures are considering bills to allow the consumption of marijuana for medicinal purposes, the federal government has recently intensified its efforts to close medical marijuana dispensaries. Federal officials contend that the legalization of medical marijuana...

Using state-level data for the period 1990 through 2007, we estimate the effect of legalizing medical marijuana on suicide rates. Our results suggest that the passage of a medical marijuana law is associated with an almost 5 percent reduction in the total suicide rate, an 11 percent reduction in...

Using evidence from recent work on truckers and disaggregated older data prior researchers did not have, we revisit a classic topic and find some new answers. We focus on differentials in average annual earnings at the firm level among mileage-paid over-the-road tractor-trailer drivers ("road...

This study estimates the dose-response relationship between Body Mass Index (BMI) and crash risk in commercial motor vehicle operators. Intake data was collected on 744 new truck drivers who were training for their commercial driver's licenses at a school operated by the cooperating trucking...

Economists and psychologists have devised numerous instruments to measure time preferences and have generated a rich literature examining the extent to which time preferences predict important outcomes; however, we still do not know which measures work best. With the help of a large sample of...