This paper considers how the diffusion of oral contraception to young unmarried women affected the number and parental characteristics of children born to these women. In the short term, pill access caused declines in fertility and increases in both the share of children born with low...

Season of birth is associated with later outcomes; what drives this association remains unclear. We consider a new explanation: variation in maternal characteristics. We document large changes in maternal characteristics for births throughout the year; winter births are disproportionally...

A critical question for Social Security policy is how program incentives affect retirement behavior. We use the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) to examine the impact of Social Security incentives on male retirement. We implement forward-looking models whereby individuals consider the...

A long-standing assumption among economists is that nursing home quality is common across Medicaid and private-pay patients within a shared facility. However, there has been only limited empirical work addressing this issue. Using a unique individual-level panel of residents of nursing homes...

Abortion legalization in the early 1970s led to dramatic changes in fertility. Some research has suggested that it altered cohort outcomes, but this literature has been limited and controversial. In this paper, we provide a framework for understanding selection mechanisms and use that framework...