Based on social security data, this paper analyzes wage trends for full employed males by estimating (censored) quantile regressions as functions of age, cohort, education, and year. We test whether a parsimonious specification separating life cycle effects from macroeconomic effects can...

The rise of unemployment in West Germany is often attributed to an inflexibility of the wage structure in the face of a skill bias in labor demand trends. In addition, there is concern in Germany that during the 70s and 80s unions were pursuing a too egalitarian wage policy. In a cohort...

This paper explores the influence of various characteristics on nursing home utilization. It examines a targeted population of elderly individuals whose poor health and lack of social supports were expected to lead to heavy use of long-term care. We develop an empirical framework based on a...

This paper formulates an empirical model of consumption and labor supply that explicitly incorporates income taxes in a multiperiod setting. This model relies on few assumptions and provides a robust framework for estimating parameters needed to predict the response of consumption and hours of...

It is well known that disability rates among the American elderly have declined over the past decades. The cause of this decline is less well established. In this paper, we test one important possible explanation--that the decline in disability occurred because of chronic disease prevention...

The highly uneven distribution of Medicare payments among elderly beneficiaries, combined with the predictability of some of the expenditures, poses several challenges to the Medicare program. We present information about the distribution of Medicare expenditures among beneficiaries in specific...