The authors estimate a health investment equation, derived from a health capital model that is an extension of the well-known Grossman model. Of particular interest is whether the health production function has constant returns to scale, as in the standard Grossman model, or decreasing returns...

In economic research, it is often important to express the marginal value of a variable in monetary terms. In random coefficient models, this marginal monetary value is the ratio of two random coefficients and is thus random itself. In this paper, we study the distribution of this ratio and...

The 2003 Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act added a new prescription drug benefit to the Medicare program known as Part D (prescription drug coverage), as well as the Low-Income Subsidy (LIS) program to provide "extra help" with premiums, deductibles, and copayments for...

As employer-provided pension plans have largely shifted from defined benefit (DB) to defined contribution (DC) pension plans, responsibility for plan investments and the accompanying risks have also shifted from the provider to the employee. Employees have to decide how much to contribute to...

The authors introduce new measures of important underlying macroeconomic phenomena that affect the financial side of the economy. These measures are calculated using the time-series factor analysis (TSFA) methodology introduced in Gilbert and Meijer (2005). The measures appear to be both more...

This paper reports stated preferences of Dutch workers for combinations of housing, employment, and commuting. The analysis uses standard logit models as well as mixed logit models. Estimation results offer insights into the relative importance of various aspects of housing, employment, and...

Besides compensation and financial incentives, several other work-related factors may affect individual retirement decisions. Specifically, job characteristics such as autonomy, skill variety, task significance and difficulty, stress and physical demands, peer pressure and relations with...

We study to what extent the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) is representative of all income groups, but with a particular emphasis on low-income groups. To focus on the HRS sample composition and abstract from potential measurement issues associated with measures of income and program...