Medicaid was primarily designed to protect and insure the poor against medical shocks. Yet, poorer people tend to live shorter lifespans and incur lower medical expenses before death than richer people. Taking these and other important dimensions of heterogeneity into account, and carefully...

Health shocks are an important source of risk. People in bad health work less, earn less, face higher medical expenses, die earlier, and accumulate much less wealth compared to those in good health. Importantly, the dynamics of health are much richer than those implied by a low-order Markov...

What are the cumulative effects of health shocks over the life-cycle? The answer depends on the nature of persistence of bad health and the extent to which it changes individuals' economic circumstances. We measure the lifetime costs of bad health using a rich structural model that can reproduce...

Earnings dynamics are much richer than those typically used in macro models with heterogenous agents. This paper provides multiple contributions. First, it proposes a simple non-parametric method to model rich earnings dynamics that is easy to estimate and introduce in structural models. Second,...