The authors use data from the earlier and later cohorts of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to estimate the effect of marriage and childbearing on wages. Their estimates imply that marriage lowers female wages by between two and four percent in the year of marriage. Marriage also lowers...

Year 2005 brought four severe hurricanes to the U.S. Gulf states, including Hurricane Katrina, an exceptional storm in terms of its magnitude of destruction. The authors examine the short- and long-term effects of Hurricane Katrina on the labor market outcomes of prime age individuals in the...

Structural models explaining retirement decisions of individuals or households in an inter-temporal setting are typically hard to estimate using data on actual retirement decisions, because choice sets are complicated and uncertain and for a large part unobserved by the researcher. This paper...

Using the Health and Retirement Study, this research investigates whether an adult child substitutes financial transfers to an elderly parent for time transfers as the cost of his or her time increases. The author develops and estimates a model of the effect of a child's wage rate on time and...

Inter-vivos cash transfers and bequests between family members total hundreds of billions of dollars each year. They may equalize resources within a generation of a family as well as across family generations. Transfers delayed to the end of life may represent a significant motive for saving....

Using panel data from the Health and Retirement Study the authors analyze the impact of a lifetime of marriage events on wealth levels near retirement. They find that unmarried widowed and divorced men and remarried men with more than one past marital disruption have lower housing wealth than...

Relatively little research has been devoted to studying self-employment among older workers although they make up a disproportionate share of the self-employed workforce. This study uses 5 waves of panel data from the Health and Retirement Study to investigate the determinants of labor force...

The authors examine how public and private pension and health insurance systems affect retirement transitions. In many countries, public and private pension eligibility, as well as access to health insurance varies between self-employed and wage and salary workers, and these differences are...

Indian immigrants in the United States and other wealthy countries are successful in entrepreneurship. Using census data from the three largest developed countries in the world receiving Indian immigrants-the United States, United Kingdom and Canada-the authors examine the performance of Indian...

This study analyzed the retirement behavior of Mexicans with migration spells to the United States that returned to Mexico and non-migrants. The analysis is based on rich panel data from the Mexican Health and Aging Study (MHAS). Approximately 9 percent of MHAS respondents age 50 and older...