This paper provides an empirical analysis of how the U.S. Social Security and Medicare system affects the labor supply of older males in the presence of incomplete markets. The authors estimate a dynamic programming model of the joint labor supply and Social Security acceptance decision. The...

This paper studies the impact of the March 1979 Three Mile Island (TMI) accident on the regulation of nuclear power plants (NPPs) and its consequences for the operating behavior and profitability of the U.S. nuclear power industry. We treat the TMI accident as a ``natural experiment'' that...

This paper presents a dynamic programming (DP) model of optimal operation of a nuclear power plant (NPP). In each period the operator decides whether to run the reactor at a given capacity level, to shut it down for preventive maintenance or refueling, or permanently close the plant for...

This paper introduces random versions of successive approximations and multigrid algorithms for computing approximate solutions to a class of finite and infinite horizon Markovian decision problems (MDPs). We prove that these algorithms succeed in breaking the curse of dimensionality for a...

This paper presents a dynamic programming (DP) model of an electric utility's optimal policy for operating a nuclear power plant (NPP). The utility chooses the level of capacity utilization of the NPP as a function of signals about the NPP's current operating state. In each period the utility...

We provide an empirical analysis of the Social Security disability application, award, and appeal process using the Health and Retirement Survey. We show that the appeal option increases the award probability from 46\% to 73\%. However, this comes at the cost of significant delays: the duration...

This paper compares the performance of the Howard (1960) policy iteration algorithm for infinite-horizon continuous-state Markovian decision processes (MDP's) using alternative random, quasi- random, and deterministic discretizations of the state space, or grids. Each grid corresponds to an...

We consider the problem of computing approximations to fixed points of quasilinear contraction mappings defined on the space of continuous functions of $d$ variables. Our main emphasis is on large d. Examples of such mappings include the Bellman operator from the theory of dynamic programming....