As aging of the U.S. population places increased demands on public programs such as Social Security, an important question is how long older Americans are willing and able to work before they retire from the labor force. While studies based on household surveys have provided information on the...

Previous research has repeatedly found a puzzling one-time drop in the mean and median of consumption at retirement, contrary to the predictions of the life-cycle hypothesis. However, very little is known as to whether these effects vary across the consumption distribution. This study expands...

Integration of data from different regions presents challenges for the calculation of entitylevel longitudinal statistics with a strong geographic component: for example, movements between employers, migration, business dynamics, and health statistics. In this paper, we consider the estimation...

Income packaging, or piecing together cash and non-cash resources from a variety of sources, is a common financial survival strategy among low-income women. This strategy is particularly important for economically disconnected women, who lack both employment income and public cash assistance...

We use Hurricane Katrina's damage to the Mississippi coast in 2005 as a natural experiment to study business survival in the aftermath of a cost shock. We find that damaged establishments that returned to operation were more resilient than those that had never been damaged. This effect is...

This paper examines the determinants of intra-firm trade in U.S. imports using detailed country-product data. We create a new measure of product contractibility based on the degree of intermediation in international trade for the product. We find important roles for the interaction of country...

I study the relationship between firm growth and the characteristics of newly hired workers. Using Census microdata I obtain a novel empirical result: when a given firm grows faster it hires workers with higher past wages. These results suggest that productive, fast-growing firms tend to hire...

This study investigates how changes in the economic incentives created by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) will affect the probability that private-sector U.S. employers will offer health insurance. Using the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey Insurance Component for 2008-2010, we predict...

In most countries, national statistical agencies do not release establishment-level business microdata, because doing so represents too large a risk to establishments’ confidentiality. Agencies potentially can manage these risks by releasing synthetic microdata, i.e., individual establishment...

Immigrants have a markedly higher likelihood of migrating internally if they live in new estinations. This paper looks at why that pattern occurs and at how immigrants’ out-migration to new versus traditional destinations responds to their labor market economic and industrial structure,...