Using data from the 1998 Wave of the Health and Retirement Study, we examine the effect of social interactions on the health insurance choices of the elderly. We find that having more social interactions, as measured by contacts with friends and neighbors, reduces the likelihood of enrolling in...

This paper uses Social Security earnings records linked to data from the Health and Retirement Study to examine the labor market behavior of rejected and accepted disability applicants prior to their application. We find that rejected applicants have substantially lower earnings and labor force...

An important issue in public policy analysis is the potential endogeneity of the policies under study. If policy changes constitute responses on the part of political decision-makers to changes in a variable of interest, then standard analyses that treat policy changes as natural experiments may...

An important issue in public policy analysis is the potential endogeneity of the policies under study. We examine the extent to which such political endogeneity biases estimates of behavioral parameters by identifying the elasticity of demand for cigarettes using the timing of state legislative...

We document the existence of a gubernatorial election cycle in state executions, suggesting that election year political considerations play a role in determining the timing of executions. Our analysis indicates that states are approximately 25 percent more likely to conduct executions in...

Using data from the 1998 Wave of the Health and Retirement Study, we examine the effect of social interactions on the health insurance choices of the elderly. We find that having more social interactions, as measured by contacts with friends and neighbors, reduces the likelihood of enrolling in...