Public sector employees receive large fractions of their lifetime income in the form of deferred compensation. The introduction of the opportunity provided to Illinois public school employees to purchase additional pension benefits allows me to estimate employees' willingness-to-pay for benefits...

Young people with private health insurance sometimes transition to the public health insurance safety net after they get sick, but popular sources of cross-sectional data obscure how frequently these transitions occur. We use longitudinal data on almost all hospital visits in New York from 1995...

We measure provider coverage networks for plans on the Massachusetts health insurance exchange using a two measures: consumer surplus from a hospital demand system and the fraction of population hospital admissions that would be covered by the network. The two measures are highly correlated, and...

When data on actual choices are not available, researchers studying preferences sometimes pose choice scenarios and ask respondents to state the actions they would choose if they were to face these scenarios. The data on stated choices are then used to estimate random utility models, as if they...

We evaluate the effects of disease type and latency on willingness to pay (WTP) to reduce environmental risks of chronic, degenerative disease. Using contingent-valuation data collected from approximately 1,200 respondents in Taiwan, we find that WTP declines with latency between exposure to...

This paper presents a new framework to estimate preferences for neighborhoods in the presence of individual imperfect information about every amenity in each neighborhood. We estimate the model with data from a new neighborhood choice program that provided information about market rents and...

Volatility permeates modern financial theories and decision making processes. As such, accurate measures and good forecasts of future volatility are critical for the implementation and evaluation of asset pricing theories. In response to this, a voluminous literature has emerged for modeling the...

This paper characterizes, interprets, and tests the over-identifying restrictions imposed in affine models of the termquot; structure. Letting r(t) = euml; Y(t), where Y is an unobserved vector affine process, our analysis proceeds in three steps. First, we show that affine models can be...

We develop a model which accounts for the observed equity premium and average risk free rate, without implying counterfactually high risk aversion. The model also does well in accounting for business cycle phenomena. With respect to the conventional measures of business cycle volatility and...

This article takes a critical look at the equity premium puzzle the inability of standard intertemporal economic models to rationalize the statistics that have characterized U.S. financial markets over the past century. A summary of historical returns for the United States and other...