One of the most striking changes in the U.S. economy over the past 50 years has been the growth in the service sector. In 1950, 57 percent of workers were employed in the service sector, by 1970 that figure had risen to 63 percent and by 2000 to 75 percent. While service sector employment grew...

In this paper, we develop and estimate a model of retirement and savings incorporating limited borrowing, stochastic wage offers, health status and survival, social security benefits, Medicare and employer provided health insurance coverage, and intentional bequests. The model is estimated on...

Opportunities for external validation of behavioral models in the social sciences that are based on randomized social experiments or on large regime shifts, that can be treated as experiments for the purpose of model validation, are extremely rare. In this paper, we consider an alternative...

In this paper, we present a unified treatment of and explanation for the evolution of wages and employment in the U.S. over the last 30 years. Specifically, we account for the pattern of changes in wage inequality, for the increased relative wage and employment of women, for the emergence of the...

Using data from the NLSY79, we structurally estimate a dynamic model of the life cycle decisions of young women. The women make joint and sequential decisions about school attendance, work, marriage, fertility and welfare participation. We use the model to perform a set of counterfactual...

This paper studies the performance of a methodology that can be used to evaluate the impact of new policies that radically depart from existing ones. It uses data gathered from a randomized schooling subsidy experiment in Mexico (i) to estimate and validate a dynamic behavioral model of parental...

I develop and structurally estimate a non-stationary overlapping generations equilibrium model of employment and workers' health insurance and wage compensation, to investigate the determinants of rising inequality in health insurance and wages in the U.S. over the last 30 years. I find that...

This paper discusses methods for evaluating the impacts of social programs prior to their implementation. Ex ante evaluation is useful for designing programs that achieve some optimality criteria, such as maximizing impact for a given cost. This paper illustrates through several examples the use...