Disability benefit recipients in the United States have nearly doubled in the past two decades, growing substantially faster than the population. It is difficult to estimate how much of this increase is explained by changes in population health, as we often lack a valid counterfactual. We...

This paper studies the optimal design of social insurance programs for disabled workers by developing and estimating an equilibrium labor search model with screening contracts. In the model, firms may strategically use employment contracts, consisting of wage and job amenities, to screen out the...

This paper is an empirical investigation of the effect of poor early life-cycle health on post-secondary educational choices and outcomes. We use panel data for a sample of 10,430 individuals who were high school seniors in the spring of 1972, and who were re-surveyed in October of each year...

Using data from Union Army pensioners and from the National Health Interview Surveys, we estimate that work-disability among white males aged 45-64 was 3.5 times as high in the late 19th century than at the end of the 20th century, including a decline and flattening of the age-profile since...

In the last twenty years the labor force participation rates of 45 to 54-year-old men have fallen 10.6 percentage points among non-whites and 4.4 percentage points among whites. I find that nearly half of this puzzling decline can be explained by the growth of the Social Security Disability...