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)...

This paper analyzes pre-retirement expectations and post-retirement satisfaction, in particular their association with the degree to which retirees' financial resources are in the form of annuities. Using the 1992-2000 Health and Retirement Study (HRS), the author finds that most retirees are...

The Food Stamp Program (FSP) is intended to help low-income households afford a nutritionally adequate diet. Since 1990, the FSP caseload has varied widely-rising sharply in the early 1990s, dropping sharply in the late 1990s, and then rising again in the early 2000s. Welfare and food stamp...

A dynamic panel data model of neonatal mortality and birth spacing is analyzed, accounting for causal effects of birth spacing on subsequent mortality and of mortality on the next birth interval, while controlling for unobserved heterogeneity in mortality (frailty) and birth spacing (fecundity)....

The Displaced New Orleans Residents Pilot Study examined the current location, well-being, and plans of people who lived in the city of New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck on August 29, 2005. The study used a representative sample of pre-Katrina dwellings in the city. Fieldwork focused on...

The authors investigate the direct and long-run effects of fertility on employment in Europe estimating dynamic models of labor supply under different assumptions regarding the exogeneity of fertility and modeling assumptions related to initial conditions, unobserved heterogeneity and serial...

The authors test the frequency of feedback information about the performance of an investment portfolio and the flexibility with which the investor can change the portfolio influence her risk attitude in markets. In line with the prediction of Myopic Loss Aversion (Benartzi and Thaler, 1995),...