Social vulnerability for older persons, especially older women, due to insufficient income in retirement and earlier in life and low market earnings may be attributable to many sources, both demographic and economic, in our globalizing world. This paper examines the problems of population...

This paper tests whether income affects the body weight and clinical weight classification of elderly Americans using a natural experiment that led otherwise identical retirees to receive significantly different Social Security payments based on their year of birth. We exploit this natural...

Medicare's Part D offers heavily subsidized new drug coverage to 22.5 million seniors to date, of whom 16.5 million are in stand-alone drug plans (Department of Health and Human Services, 2006). The government delegated the delivery of the benefit to private insurance companies arguing that...

Opioid overdose deaths in older adults have increased substantially over the past two decades. This increase has occurred despite the availability of effective treatments. Methadone, one of just three medications approved by the Food & Drug Administration for opioid use disorder (OUD) treatment,...

Enrollment in one public benefit program often affects enrollment in others. We study life-course spillovers by examining how access to publicly subsidized health insurance prior to age 65 affects public benefit choices at the age of Medicare eligibility. We use administrative data to examine...