This article examines proposals to transfer Social Security benefits from married couples to surviving widows in terms of effects on poverty rates, trust fund expenditures, and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) expenditures. Because widows are much more likely to be living in poverty than older...

We propose a new approach to analyzing gender differences in wages. This approach identifies several alternative explanatory mechanisms to account for the sorting of women and men into different types of jobs that offer different levels of reward. ...

This article estimates the impact that young women's ex ante preferences for future labor force attachment have on their human capital accumulation and pay. Empirical evidence from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Young Women aged 14 to 24 in 1968 supports the human capital hypothesis that...

This study uses actual observations of reservation wages from the National Longitudinal Survey of Mature Women who were 35 to 49 years of age in 1972 to estimate, with a two-stage least squares procedure, a model of the jobsearch behavior of unemployed women. To a greater extent than shown by...

The long-term shift in coverage from defined benefit (DB) pensions to defined contribution (DC) plans may accelerate rapidly as more large companies freeze their DB pensions and replace them with new or enhanced DC plans. This paper uses the Model of Income in the Near Term to simulate the...

This paper examines methods of decomposing a difference in levels between groups for a dependent variable such as income. Applied to regression equations, this technique estimates the contribution to the difference from divergent characteristics and divergent rates of converting characteristics...