Population aging is primarily the result of past declines in fertility, which produced a decades long period in which the ratio of dependents to working age adults was reduced. Rising old-age dependency in many countries represents the inevitable passing of this %u201Cdemographic dividend.%u201D...

We study how the health and health insurance coverage of Mexican immigrants change with time in the US. Cross-sectional analyses suggest that approximately three decades of residency in the US is associated with a 9 to 11 percentage point (12% to 15%) decline in the probability of being...

Disability Insurance (DI) programs have long been criticized by economists for apparent work disincentives. Some countries have recently modified their programs such that DI recipients are allowed to keep some of their benefits if they return to work, and other countries are considering similar...

In this work we combine wage data from Social Security working histories and health information available in the Survey of Health and Retirement in Europe to explore the link between health, financial incentives and retirement in Spain. Our results show that individuals in worse health quintiles...

This study explores economic aspects of the market for long term care (LTC) with a special focus on Japan. First, we describe the LTC system in Japan as presently implemented, and we highlight some aspects of the program that are novel and potentially of interest to other countries seeking...

More than 80 percent of nonelderly U.S. adults are insured against the risk of disabling physical or mental illness by Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). This article evaluates the causes of the extraordinary growth in SSDI enrollment, considers its fiscal ramifications, and discusses...

This paper investigates the interaction between measures of health, disability pension take up and labor market performance in Denmark by charting their development over time and by examining how they are affected by key policy reforms in the area of early retirement. The main emphasis is on the...

In this paper we analyze the trends in labor force participation and transitions to benefit programs of older workers in relation to health trends as well as recent Social Security reforms. Our preliminary conclusions are pessimistic regarding the effect of health improvements on the labor...

This paper describes the development of population health and disability insurance utilization for older workers in Sweden and analyzes the relation between the two. We use three different measures of population health: (1) the mortality rate (measured between 1950 and 2009); (2) the prevalence...

Measuring sexual orientation, behavior, and related opinions is difficult because responses are biased towards socially acceptable answers. We test whether measurements are biased even when responses are private and anonymous and use our results to identify sexuality-related norms and how they...