Margaret Sanger established the first birth control clinic in New York in 1916. From the mid-1920s, "Sanger clinics" spread over the entire U.S. Combining newly digitized data on the roll-out of these clinics, full-count Census data, and administrative vital statistics, we find that birth...

This paper studies how better access to public health insurance affects infant mortality during pandemics. Our analysis combines cross-state variation in mandated eligibility for Medicaid with two influenza pandemics — the 1957-58 "Asian Flu" pandemic and the 1968-69 "Hong Kong Flu" — that...

This paper contributes to the literature on the labor market consequences of unhealthy behaviors and poor health by examining a previously underappreciated consequence of the rise in obesity in the United States: challenges for military recruitment. Specifically, this paper estimates the percent...

We document that, over the 20th century, age at first marriage followed a U-shaped pattern, while the gender education gap tracked an inverted-U path in the United States. To explain this, we propose a multi-period frictionless matching model where educational and marriage decisions are...

Do households value access to free health insurance when making labor supply decisions? We answer this question using the introduction of universal health insurance in Mexico, the Seguro Popular (SP), in 2002. The SP targeted individuals not covered by Social Security and broke the link between...

We study the role and structure of commodity taxes when consumption and labor supplies are determined through a bargaining procedure between spouses, and where an optimal income tax is also available. We focus on the question whether there should be differences in tax treatment between "female"...

Many countries impose job search requirements on unemployment benefit recipients. Existing studies have evaluated only incremental changes to requirements. Australian reforms in 1995 saw groups of welfare recipients newly subjected to job search requirements, allowing us to produce the first...

The purpose of the paper is to provide a discussion of the various approaches for accounting for labour supply responses in microsimulation models. The paper focuses attention on two methodologies for modelling labour supply: the discrete choice model and the random utility – random...

This paper studies the design of couples' income taxation when consumption and labor supply decisions within the couple are made by maximizing a weighted sum of the spouses' utilities; bargaining weights are given but specific to each couple. Information structure and labor supply decisions...

Higher replacement rates often imply higher levels of absenteeism, yet even in generous welfare economies, private sick pay is provided in addition to the public sick pay. Why? Using comparative workplace data for the UK and Norway we show that the higher level of absenteeism in Norway compared...