We develop a model of retirement and human capital investment to study the effects of tax and retirement policies. Workers choose the supply of raw labor (career length) and also the human capital embodied in their labor. Our model explains a significant fraction of the US-Europe difference in...

Common financial planning advice calls for households to ensure that retirement income exceeds 70 percent of average pre-retirement income. We use an augmented life-cycle model of household behavior to examine optimal replacement rates for a representative set of retired American households. We...

We study the interaction between consumption and health in retirement. Our main contribution is the estimation of a consumption Euler equation taking health into consideration. The Euler equation is derived from a model of consumption in retirement with three important building blocks of health:...

This paper quantifies the effects of the totalization agreements that coordinate the United States Social Security program with the comparable programs of other countries. For each treated country that has signed an agreement with the U.S., we construct a synthetic control country by properly...

We develop and estimate a model in which individuals make decisions on consumption, human capital investment, labor supply, and retirement. Unlike all previous work, our model allows both an endogenous wage process (which is typically assumed exogenous in the human capital and earnings dynamics...

Totalization agreements coordinate the United States Social Security program with other countries’ comparable programs. We estimate each totalization agreement’s impact on a variety of bilateral trade outcomes. We find the impact is quite heterogeneous, both across agreements/countries and...

Many new technologies display long adoption lags, and this is often interpreted as evidence of frictions inconsistent with the standard neoclassical model. In this paper we study the diffusion of the tractor in American agriculture between 1910 and 1960 – a well known case of slow diffusion...

Empirical evidence suggests that there is a long lag between the time a new technology is introduced and the time at which it is widely adopted. The conventional wisdom is that these observations are inconsistent with the predictions of the frictionless neoclassical model. In this paper we show...

We develop and estimate a life-cycle model in which individuals make decisions about consumption, human capital investment, and labor supply and use it to analyze changes in Social Security rules. The most important aspect of our paper is human capital towards the end of the life cycle which...

Nearly 40% of births in the United States are unintended, and this phenomenon is disproportionately common among Black Americans and women with lower education. Given that being born to unprepared parents significantly affects children's outcomes, could family planning access affect...