Different beliefs about how fair social competition is and what determines income inequality, influence the redistributive policy chosen democratically in a society. But the composition of income in the first place depends on equilibrium tax policies. If a society believes that individual effort...

In this paper we examine the link between retrospectively reported measures of childhood health and the prevalence of various major and minor diseases at older ages. Our analysis is based on comparable retrospective questionnaires placed in the Health and Retirement Study and the English...

Nearly a quarter of Mexico's workforce is self employed. But in the U.S. rates of self employment among Mexican Americans are only 6 percent, about half the rate among non-Latino whites. Using data from the Mexican and U.S. population census, we show that neither industrial composition nor...

Life expectancy in the United States fares poorly in international comparisons, primarily because of high mortality rates above age 50. Its low ranking is often blamed on a poor performance by the health care system rather than on behavioral or social factors. This paper presents evidence on the...

Do international trade and finance flow together? In theory, trade and finance can be substitutes or complements, so the matter must be resolved empirically. We study trade and financial flows from the United Kingdom from 1870 to 1913 and the United States in the interwar years. Trade and...

Using data from the 2010-2014 American Community Survey, we use a procedure suggested by Capps et al. (2015) to identify refugees from the larger group of immigrants to examine the outcomes of refugees relocated to the U.S. Among young adults, we show that refugees that enter the U.S. before age...

Disability insurance take-up has expanded substantially in the past twenty years in the United States while shrinking in Canada. We empirically assess these trends by measuring the strength of the ‘push' from weak labor markets versus the ‘pull' of more generous benefits. Using an...

We provide levels of, compositions of, and inequalities in household augmented wealth – defined as the sum of net worth and pension wealth – for two countries: the United States and Germany. Pension wealth makes up a considerable portion of household wealth: about 48% in the United States...

Although the official statistics imply that the rate of growth of real GDP in the United States has declined in recent years, it has still been substantially higher than the real growth rates in Europe and the other industrial countries, leading to higher real per capita incomes. This paper...

We compare patterns of unemployment and joblessness between Canada and the U.S. during the Great Recession. Similar to previous findings for the U.S. in Kroft et al. [2016], we document a rise in long-term unemployment in Canada. This increase is not accounted for by changes in the observable...