This paper studies the effects of differential tax treatment toward married and single individuals in the US on marriage formation and composition, divorce and labor supply. We develop a marriage market model with search frictions and heterogeneous agents that is sufficiently rich to capture key...

Economists and demographers have long argued that fertility differs by income (differential fertility), and that social security creates incentives for people to rear fewer children. Does the effect of social security on fertility differ by income? How does social security change the...

James Ahiakpor's critique of our 2002 work on the relationship between a certain 1932 Harvard Memorandum on anti-depression policies and the 1932 Harris Foundation Manifesto dealing with the same issues misses the significance of these documents, and of the relationships between them, both for...

This paper considers the use of statistical profiling to allocate persons to alternative options within government programs, or to participation or non-participation in programs. Profiling has been used in the United States to allocate unemployment insurance (UI) claimants to reemployment...

This paper considers the problem of pet overpopulation. It develops a tractable dynamic model whose positive predictions square well with key features of the current U.S. market for pets. The model is used to understand, from a welfare economic perspective, the sense in which there is...

We use data on households' deductible choices in auto and home insurance to estimate a structural model of risky choice that incorporates standard risk aversion (concave utility over final wealth), loss aversion, and nonlinear probability weighting. Our estimates indicate that nonlinear...

Previous study by Card and Lewis (2005) has found (puzzling) that inflows of Mexican immigrants into new metropolitan areas have had no effect on the relative wages of very low-skill (high school dropouts). Rather, Mexican workers do affect relative wages for high school graduates. Whereas Card...

In this article, we review the empirical evidence on the impact of education vouchers on student achievement, and briefly discuss the evidence from other forms of school choice. The best research to date finds relatively small achievement gains for students offered education vouchers, most of...

We use a new panel dataset of credit card accounts to analyze how consumers responded to the 2001 federal income tax rebates. We estimate the monthly response of credit card payments, spending, and debt, exploiting the unique, randomized timing of the rebate disbursement. We find that on average...

Because a significant portion of U.S. students lacks critical mathematic skills, schools across the country are investing heavily in computerized curriculums as a way to enhance education output, even though there is surprisingly little evidence that they actually improve student achievement. In...