In 1998, California changed its regulation of working hours from daily overtime (required overtime for hours above eight per day) to weekly overtime (required overtime for hours above forty per week). We analyze the effects of this change in overtime law on hours of work using a neoclassical...

Cohabitation is an increasingly prevalent living arrangement in the United States. Although the effects of living in a cohabiting arrangement on child well-being are not fully understood, the literature on children growing up in cohabiting families suggests that they have poorer developmental...

This paper develops a new method for estimating the structural parameters of dynamic programming problems in which choices are discrete. The method reduces the computational burden of estimating such models. We show the valuation functions characterizing the expected future utility function...

Institutional reform litigation places significant, and, at times, inappropriate constraints on the public manager’s ability to balance individual and collective justice. An exemplary misuse of such litigation was the recent New York child welfare case of Marisol A. v. Giuliani. The U.S....

The extent to which discrimination against people with disabilities has changed from 1984 to 1993 is estimated in this paper. A novel data source—a set of health-impaired workers who self-report that their productivity is not affected by their impairment—is used to separately identify the...

This paper analyzes how markets for old-age care respond to the aging of populations. We consider how the biological forces, which govern the stocks of frail and healthy persons in a population, interact with economic forces, which govern the demand for and supply of care. We argue that aging,...

Vocational training and general education are the two predominant forms of secondary schooling around the world. Most studies that compare the effect of vocational and general education on labor market outcomes in the cross-section suffer from selection bias since less able students are more...

In this paper, I estimate the extent of precautionary accumulation using data from a new survey: the US Health and Retirement Study, which samples older households. I account for many determinants of wealth, not only past economic circumstances and expectations about future resources, but also...

In this paper, I review the issues confronted in designing the U.S. National Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) Study, discuss how these issues were dealt with and assess the efficacy of the final design in evaluating the JTPA system and in resolving the inconclusiveness of past evaluations of...

Economists have strong theoretical predictions about how in-kind transfer programs – such as providing vouchers for food – impact consumption. Despite the prominence of the theory, there has been little empirical work documenting actual responses to in-kind transfers. In this work, we...