The price sensitivity of demand for nursing home care is a subject of considerable policy interest. Standard methods for measuring price responsiveness are difficult to apply to nursing home care, since accurate price information is usually unavailable and prices may reflect unmeasured quality...

Life tables with specific causes of death, particularly when adjusted for demographic and other personal characteristics, can be important components of cost-effectiveness and other economic studies. However, there are few sources of nationally representative information that can be used to...

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 study presents a general methodology for fitting multiple time series models to panel data. The basic statistical framework considered here consists of a dynamic simultaneous equation model where disturbances follow a permanent-transitory scheme with transitory components generated by a...

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...

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...

This paper examines the economics of investing the central trust fund of Social Security in private securities. We note that switching from a policy of having the trust fund invest solely in special issue Treasury bonds to one where some of the portfolio holds common stocks amounts to an asset...

This paper formulates and estimates a structural life cycle model of labor supply. Using theoretical characterizations derived from an economic model of life cycle behavior, a two-stage empirical analysis yields estimates of intertemporal and uncompensated substitution effects which provides the...

This paper surveys new methods for estimatifg labor supply functions. A unified framework of analysis is presented. All recent models of labor supply are special cases of a general index function model developed for the analysis o dummy endogenous variables

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...