We exploit a sharp change in the likelihood that an individual is covered by health insurance when they turn 19 years of age to study how health insurance affects reported health status. We find that an individual is 6 percentage points less likely to have health insurance when they turn 19....

Despite being located within a well integrated economy such as the US, its states exhibit considerable heterogeneity, both in the composition of output and in sectoral labor productivity growth. In this paper, we examine the sources of uneven labor productivity growth across sectors in US...

We propose a simple theory of personal income distribution, equilibrium unemployment, and interindustry trade, in which product markets are perfectly competitive and labor markets exhibit search related frictions. Individuals, based on their managerial talent, choose to become self-employed...

This paper estimates the magnitudes of government spending and tax multipliers within a regime-switching framework for the U.S economy during the period 1949:1- 2006:4. Our results show that the magnitudes of spending multipliers are larger during periods of low economic activity, while the...

This paper quantifies the effect of federal subsidies on state Medicaid provision in the United States. The U.S. federal government matches each state at least one dollar for each dollar that the state spends on Medicaid. This subsidy creates an incentive for states to provide a more generous...

Critics of U.S. high-skilled guest worker visa programs argue that 1) program regulations tie workers to their sponsoring firm, creating working conditions akin to indentured servitude and that 2) the pro- grams lack a vehicle for adjusting downward the number of visas avail- able during a...

This paper develops a two-country, two-sector model of trade where the only difference between two countries is the cost of human capital formation. It is shown that this difference completely shapes the pattern of trade. Trade, in turn, affects the distribution of human capital both at...

This paper develops a monopolistic competition model with heterogeneous firms to study the interaction between technology adoption and trade in a world of two countries facing different technology adoption costs. It shows that a reduction in the technology adoption cost in one country increases...

This paper incorporates home production into a dynamic general equilibrium model of overlapping generations with endogenous retirement to study Social Secu- rity reforms. As such, the model di¤erentiates both consumption goods and labor e¤ort according to their respective roles in home...

We revisit the idea that colonized countries that were more (less) economically advanced in 1500 became poorer (richer, respectively) by the late 20th century. Using data on place of origin of today’s country populations and the urbanization and population density measures used by Acemoglu et...