This paper investigates whether subjective expectations about future mortality affect consumption and bequests motives. We estimate a dynamic life-cycle model based on subjective survival rates and wealth from the panel dataset Asset and Health Dynamics among Oldest Old. We find that bequest...

This paper investigates to what extent and through which channels that health and educational attainment are interdependent. A dynamic model of schooling, work, health expenditure, and savings is developed. The structural framework explicitly models two existing hypotheses on the correlation...

This paper investigates to what extent the differences in education between black and white men can be explained by the differences in their mortality risks. A dynamic optimal stopping-point life cycle model is examined, in which group-level mortality risk plays an important role in determining...

At the end of 1998, China launched a government-run mandatory insurance program, the Urban Employee Basic Medical Insurance (UEBMI), to replace the previous medical insurance system. Using the UEBMI reform in China as a natural experiment, this study identify variations in patient cost sharing...

Using three years of data from the 47 prefectures of Japan, we estimate behavior of households who simultaneously make discrete decisions about vehicle ownership and continuous decisions about driving distance. We use the estimated parameters to calculate elasticities and to simulate the effects...

This paper develops a search-matching model to study the impact of the unemployment rate on the housing market in the presence of the thick market effect. We estimate the structural model using Texas city-level data that covers three years, 1990, 2000 and 2010. Our structural estimation helps...

This paper uses the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in China as a natural experiment to examine how the housing market reacted to this unforeseen, extreme event. We use a unique transaction dataset for new (under construction) apartment units to analyze the pricing behavior of units in lower versus...

Conventional theory for private information of adverse selection predicts a positive correlation between insurance coverage and ex post risk. This paper shows the opposite in the life insurance market despite the clear evidence of private information on mortality risk. The reason for this...

This paper examines schools' decisions to sort students into different classes and how those sorting processes impact student achievement. There are two potential effects that result from schools creating homogeneous classes--a "tracking effect," which allows teachers to direct their focus to a...

This paper provides a search model for housing market where the number of buyers and/or sellers plays very important role. The model makes three testable predictions: (1) the unemployment rate has a negative impact on the trading volume and the sale prices of the housing market; (2) a larger...