White, non-college-educated Americans born in the 1960s face shorter life expectancies, higher medical expenses, and lower wages per unit of human capital compared with those born in the 1940s, and men's wages declined more than women's. After documenting these changes, we use a life-cycle model...

In the United States, both taxes and old age Social Security benefits depend on one's marital status and tend to discourage the labor supply of the secondary earner. To what extent are these provisions holding back female labor supply? We estimate a rich life cycle model of labor supply and...

In old age, consumption can fluctuate because of shocks to available resources and because health shocks affect utility from consumption. We find that even temporary drops in income and health are associated with drops in consumption and most of the effect of temporary drops in health on...

In this paper we propose a method to characterize the time series properties of individual consumption, income and interest rates using micro data, as studies in labour economics have characterized the time series properties of hours and earnings. Our approach, however, does not remove aggregate...

In the U.S., both taxes and old age Social Security benefits depend on one's marital status and tend to discourage the labor supply of the secondary earner. We study the effects of eliminating these marriage-related provisions on the labor supply and savings of two different cohorts. To do so,...

Wages, labor market participation, hours worked, and savings differ by gender and marital status. In addition, women and married people make up for a large fraction of the population and of labor market participants, total hours worked, and total earnings. For the most part, macroeconomists have...

Medicaid is a government program that provides health insurance to the old who are sick and have little assets and income compared to their medical needs. Thus, it explicitly tests for income, assets, and health or medical needs to determine eligibility. We ask how these rules map into the...

While "'Tis impossible to be sure of any thing but Death and Taxes" (Bullock, 1716), the structure of taxes and their burden has undergone large and frequent changes over time. We provide a brief history of the U.S. federal income tax reforms since the 1960s, we calculate effective federal...

While health affects many economic outcomes, its dynamics are still poorly understood. We use k means clustering, a machine learning technique, and data from the Health and Retirement Study to identify health types during middle and old age. We identify five health types: the vigorous resilient,...

We measure health inequality during middle and old age by race, ethnicity, and gender and evaluate the extent to which it can explain inequalities in other key economic outcomes using the Health and Retirement Study data set. Our main measure of health is frailty, which is the fraction of one's...