It is widely believed that health plays a major role in retirement decisions. The most important problem in including health in retirement models is the lack of availability of a good measure of health at the individual level in existing data sets. This problem is exacerbated when a model...

The authors examine ethnic differences in objective and perceived economic well-being in rural Guatemala. The evidence shows that long-standing ethnic differentials in objective indicators of household economic well-being actually widened between 1988 and 1995, a period characterized by rapid...

The goal of this paper is to analyze a model to explain consumption by couples. It is an extension fo the model for singles by Yaari (1195), and therefore emphasizes the role of mortality risk. It also allows for what I call a "true" bequest motive, bequeathing by a couple to the next...

Labor supply theory predicts systematic heterogeneity in the impact of recent welfare reforms on earnings, transfers, and income. Yet most welfare reform research focuses on mean impacts. We investigate the importance of heterogeneity using random-assignment data from Connecticut's Jobs First...

Peer interactions have been argued to play a major role in student academic achievement. Recent work has focused on measuring the structure of peer interactions with the location of the student in their social network and has found a positive relationship between student popularity and academic...

We exemine two potential modes of local empowerment: "dominance, " whereby each group is the majoriy of voters in single election districts ( reinforcing separative tendencies) , and "influence" whereby a group gains "influential minority" status in several districts ( reinforcing unifying...

Forty years ago, Simon Kuznets, in his presidential address to the American Economics Association, outlined his hypothesis that the process of economic development would first be accompanied by rising disparities in economic well-being, followed by a period when the distribution wouls be stable...

Mental health disorders in adolescence are pervasive, often carry into adulthood, and appear to be inversely associated with social status. We examine how structural aspects of neighborhood context, specifically, socioeconomic stratification and racial/ethnic segregation, affect adolescent...