A worker's decision whether to apply for public transfers may depend not only on his expected level of foregone labor earnings but also on his degree of uncertainty about such earnings. This paper provides theory and evidence about the effects of earnings and eligibility uncertainty on...

Measurement error in health and disability status has been widely accepted as a central problem for social science research. Long-standing debates about the prevalence of disability, the role of health in labor market outcomes, and the influence of federal disability policy on declining...

This paper derives simple closed-form identification regions for the U.S. nonelderly population's prevalence of health insurance coverage in the presence of household reporting errors. The methods extend Horowitz and Manski's (1995) nonparametric analysis of contaminated samples for the case...

Using both direct and indirect information about work limitation, this paper constructs and estimates a simultaneous model of "true" work disability, applications for federal disability benefits, and awards. Potential overreporting of work limitation by applicants is treated as a censored-sample...

This paper provides new evidence about the impact of Social Security Disability Insurance on male labor force participation decisions based on estimates from a structural model of applications, awards, and state-contingent lifetime income flows. The lifetime framework makes it possible to...

Recent evidence from Bound et al. (2001) and Black et al. (2003) suggests that reporting errors in survey data routinely violate all of the classical measurement error assumptions. The econometrics literature has not considered the consequences of arbitrary measurement error for identification...

There is very little known about health care utilization among the homeless or about the role of health insurance on utilization patterns. Many health care reform proposals advocate expanding health insurance coverage for various segments of society, including the homeless. Although homeless...

The relative efficiency of ad valorem and unit taxes is analyzed for oligopolistic markets. We provide a simple proof that ad valorem taxes welfare-dominate unit taxes in the short run if production costs are identical across firms. The proof covers a wide range of market conduct and...