How do sudden, large wealth losses affect mental health? Most prior studies of the causal effects of material well-being on health use identification strategies involving income increases; these studies as well as prior research on stock market accumulations may not inform this question if the...

Do sudden, large wealth losses affect mental health? We use exogenous variation in the interview dates of the 2008 Health and Retirement Study to assess the impact of large wealth losses on mental health among older U.S. adults. We compare cross-wave changes in wealth and mental health for...

Are early Social Security claimers too sick to work? We linked Health and Retirement Study data to Medicare claims to study health care utilization at ages 65 and 70. We find that Social Security Disability Insurance recipients use more health care on average than those who never received DI. At...

Informal care is the largest source of long-term care for elderly, surpassing home health care and nursing home care. By definition, informal care is unpaid. It remains a puzzle why so many adult children give freely of their time. Transfers of time to the older generation may be balanced by...

Diabetes is rapidly escalating amongst low-income, older adults at great cost to the Medicare program. We use longitudinal survey data from the Health and Retirement Study linked to administrative Medicare records and biomarker data to assess the relationship between Food Stamp receipt and...

We use Health and Retirement Study data linked to the Department of Labor’s O*Net classification system to examine the relationship between lifetime exposure to occupational demands and retirement behavior. We consistently found that both non-routine cognitive analytic and non-routine physical...

In this study, we assess the long-run impact of labor market conditions at the time of school-leaving on marriage and fertility outcomes. We draw data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. Our sample left school between 1976 and 1989, and we use variation in the state unemployment...

This study investigates the associations between self-assessed adverse labor market events (experiencing problems with coworkers, employment changes, financial strain) and health. Longitudinal data are obtained from the National Epidemiological Survey of Alcohol and Related Conditions. Our...

Using a rich, recent and nationally representative longitudinal survey specifically designed to examine alcohol use and associated problems, we investigate the effects of alcohol misuse on a series of understudied and perhaps less common employment problems. Such problems include being fired or...