Charles (2003) examines the dynamic effects of disability, finding a small decline in earnings and hours following disability onset, even for those who have positive disability reports for each of the next ten years. These outcomes also rebound quickly after the onset of disability. In recent...

The term "grade inflation" covers a multitude of phenomena, some of which are even alleged to be sins. Continuing increases in average grades have been widely documented in many universities over the last several decades. Also widely documented, and often associated with grade inflation, are...

This paper assesses how retirement - defined as permanent labor force non-participation in a man's mature years - affects psychological welfare. The raw correlation between retirement and well-being is negative. But this does not imply causation. In particular, people with idiosyncratically low...

This paper tests the predictions about the relationship between racial prejudice and racial wage gaps from Becker's (1957) seminal work on employer discrimination - something which has not previously been done in the large economics discrimination literature. Using rich data on racial prejudice...

We discuss research on discrimination against blacks and other racial minorities in labor market outcomes, highlighting fundamental challenges faced by empirical work in this area. Specifically, for work devoted to measuring whether and how much discrimination exists, we discuss how the absence...

This paper studies how rising male incarceration has affected women through its effect on the marriage market. Variation in marriage-market shocks arising from incarceration is isolated using two facts: the tendency of people to marry within marriage markets defined by the interaction of race,...

This paper argues that, since activities that provide political information are complementary with leisure, increased labor market activity should lower turnout, but should do so least in prominent elections where information is ubiquitous. Using official county-level voting data and a variety...

Using county-level data across several decades, and various OLS and TSLS models, we find that higher local wages and employment lower turnout in elections for governor, senator, US Congress and state House of Representatives, but have no effect on presidential turnout. We also find that the...

Using data recently collected by the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we find that the intergenerational correlation in expenditures is no larger than that in income, suggesting limited intra-family risk-sharing. On the other hand, even after controlling for the intergenerational correlation in...