This paper studies factor substitution in one important sector: the nursing home industry. Specifically, we measure the extent to which nursing homes substitute materials for labor when labor becomes relatively more expensive. From a policy perspective, factor substitution in this market is...

This paper is the first to use the method of instrumental variables (IV) to estimate the impact of obesity on medical costs in order to address the endogeneity of weight and to reduce the bias from reporting error in weight. Models are estimated using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel...

In May 1981, President François Mitterrand regularized the status of undocumented immigrant workers in France. The newly legalized immigrants represented 12 percent of the non-French workforce and about 1 percent of all workers. Employers have monopsony power over undocumented workers because...

This paper investigates the association between obesity and skill attainment in early childhood (aged 2-4 years). Data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study are used to estimate models of developmental functioning in four critical areas (verbal skills, activities of daily living, motor...

This paper examines the contribution of the rise in the return to ability to the rise in the economic return to education. All of the evidence on this question comes from panel data sets in which a small collection of adjacent birth cohorts is followed over time. The structure of the data...

There are several ways to measure fatness and obesity, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. The primary measure for tracking the prevalence of obesity has historically been body mass index (BMI). This paper compares long-run trends in the prevalence of obesity when obesity is defined...

As an example of the value of fatness in predicting social science outcomes, we show that while BMI is positively correlated with the probability of employment disability in the PSID, when body mass is divided into its components, fatness is positively correlated with disability while fat-free...

This paper reexamines the empirical basisfor two "facts" which seem to be found in most cross-section studies of immigrant earnings: (1) the earnings of immigrants grow rapidly as they assimilate into the U.S.; and (2) this rapid growth leads to many immigrants overtaking the earnings of the...

This paper demonstrates that labor turnover is a significant factor in understanding wage growth since it affects both wage growth across jobs and wage growth within the job. Our analysis shows that young men who quit experience significant wage gains compared to stayers and compared to their...

We take advantage of our longitudinal data to explore individual variation in the parameters of individual earnings functions. (1) For this purpose we fit an earnings function to each of the individual histories in the sample.(2) We then try to ascertain the extent to which the estimated...