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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...