Measuring the overall impact of public health insurance receipt is important in an era of increased access to publicly-provided and subsidized insurance. Although government expansion of health insurance to older workers leads to labor supply reductions for recipients, there may be spillover...

This paper discusses technical concerns and choices that arise when crafting a correspondence or audit study using external validity as a motivating framework. We will discuss resume creation, including power analysis, choice of inputs, pros and cons of matching pairs, solutions to the limited...

We use a laboratory experiment with randomized resumes and eyetracking to explore the effects of race on employment discrimination over the lifecycle. We show race discrimination against prime-age black job applicants that diminishes into middle age before re-emerging for older applicants....

Black women in current cohorts ages 50 to 72 years have lower employment than similar white women, despite having had higher employment when they were middle-aged and younger. Earlier cohorts of older black women also worked more than their white counterparts. Although it is not surprising that...

Eye-tracking is becoming an increasingly popular tool for understanding the underlying behavior driving economic decisions. However, an important unanswered methodological question is whether the use of an eye-tracking device itself induces changes in the behavior of experiment participants. We...

During the 19th century, the US birthrate fell by half. While previous economic literature has emphasized demand-side explanations for this decline--that rising land prices and literacy caused a decrease in demand for children--historians and others have emphasized changes in the supply of...

Saving when faced with the immediate option to spend is an unpleasant but not conceptually difficult task. One popular approach contradicts traditional economic theory by suggesting that people in debt should pay off their debts from smallest size to largest regardless of interest rate, to...

Some anti-discrimination laws have the perverse effect of harming the very class they were meant to protect. This paper provides evidence that age discrimination laws belong to this perverse class. Prior to the enforcement of the federal law, state laws had little effect on older workers,...

As the baby boom cohort reaches retirement age, demographic pressures on public programs such as social security may cause policy makers to cut benefits and encourage employment at later ages. This paper reports on a labor market experiment to determine the hiring conditions for older women in...

We argue that the environment determines life span, using historical data to show that such indicators of environmental insults in early childhood and young adulthood as quarter of birth, residence, occupation, wealth, and the incidence of specific infectious diseases affected older age...