This paper evaluates the effectiveness of recent welfare reforms, investigating the effects of both state-specific waivers in the early 1990s and the 1996 federal reform legislation. Unlike earlier work, the authors analyze a wide array of indicators, including welfare participation, labor...

This paper examines the impact of labor market institutions (LMI) on business cycle (BC) synchronization. The authors first develop a two-country right-to-manage model of wage bargaining. They find that, following a symmetric demand change, cross-country differences in LMI generate divergent...

This paper develops a new theoretical and empirical approach to studying historical trends in social inequalities in mortality. The author describes how within group inequality in mortality (e.g. IQRo) can be used to identify the timing and pace of epidemiological transitions, and she relates...

Based on a sample of actual bequests that is population-representative and on the subjective probability of bequests, the authors estimate the distribution of bequests that the older population will make. The authors find that the distribution is highly skewed, so that the typical baby-boom...

The authors examine differences in health among Latino subgroups using the 1992-1996 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS). They explore immigrant-native differences in health within detailed racial/ethnic group, by gender. For most groups, immigrants have better general health, activity...

Previous studies have demonstrated both large efficiency gains and reductions in bias by incorporating population information in regression estimation with sample survey data. These studies, however, assume the population values are exact. This assumption is relaxed here through a Bayesian...

The authors study the effects of liquidity constraints and start-up costs on the relationship between wealth and the fraction of entrepreneurs in an economy. They develop a dynamic occupational choice model with endogenous wealth and entry into entrepreneurship. The model predicts that, with...

This paper uses a calibrated life cycle model to quantify the distributional effects of Social Security reforms. The authors focus on two countries, Italy and France, because they adopted two different strategies to cope with aging. While France marginally modified its defined benefit pension...

In this paper, the authors review studies that have evaluated the quality of retrospective data collected in the 1976-77 and 1988 Malaysian Family Life Surveys. The evaluations considered the internal consistency of the data, expected relationships between variables, comparisons with external...

The paper investigates risk attitudes among different types of individuals. The authors use several different measures of risk attitudes, including questions on choices between uncertain income streams suggested by Barsky et al. (1997) and a number of ad hoc measures. As in Barsky et al. (1997)...