This paper suggests that pension characteristics are simultaneously determined along with workers' retirement ages. Both the age of pension eligibility and actual retirement age are determined by the productivity and marginal disutility of work, factors that are influenced by worker and job...

There is considerable evidence that minorities are less likely than whites to be covered under employment-based health insurance. In 2001, rates of Hispanic full-time workers were 21 and 15 percentage points lower than those of non-Hispanic white men and women. For policy purposes, understanding...

Demand for employment-based insurance is typically treated as an individual rather than a household decision. Dual-earner households are now the modal U.S. married household, however, and most firms offer family coverage as an option available to employees. Findings from a model estimating...

We use information from Social Security earnings records to examine the accuracy of survey responses regarding participation in tax-deferred pension plans. As employer-provided defined benefit pensions are replaced by voluntary contribution plans, employees’ understanding of the link between...

Measurement of quality changes has proven to be an especially difficult aspect of calculating unbiased rates of inflation. We propose a new methodology of capturing quality improvements based on consumer focus groups and apply this methodology in an environment where quality changes might be...

This paper applies three different methods widely used in the literature to track changes in shadow economic activity in Georgia following a drastic tax reform in 2005. The first method is a currency demand approach based on macro level data. The second and third methods rely on micro data from...

We develop an estimator of unreported income, perhaps due to tax evasion, that does not depend on as strict identifying assumptions as previous estimators based on microeconomic data. The standard identifying assumption that the self-employed underreport income whereas wage and salary workers do...