Population aging is not a looming crisis of the future - it is already here. The ultimate impact of population aging on our standard of living in the future depends a great deal on how long people choose to work before they retire from the labor force. Here there is reason for optimism. In this...

Family composition has changed dramatically over the past 25 years. Divorce rates increased and remarriage rates declined. While considerable research established a link between marriage and earnings, far less is empirically understood about the effect of marriage on wealth although wealth is an...

Small businesses play a significant role in economic development and growth in the United States and their vital importance in the American economy has prompted federal and state governments and private organizations to implement various programs to facilitate small business creation and...

Using panel data from the Health and Retirement Study the authors analyze the impact of a lifetime of marriage events on wealth levels near retirement. They find that unmarried widowed and divorced men and remarried men with more than one past marital disruption have lower housing wealth than...

We examine the retirement behavior of federal civil service workers. This research contributes to the literature that more generally examines how retirement behavior responds to financial incentives. The civil service workers in our study provide an interesting case study because they do not...

Gaining access to health insurance in childhood has been associated with improved childhood health and educational attainment. Expansions in health insurance access have steadily lowered the rates of uninsured children and may have long term consequences for adult health and well being. This...

The authors use data from the earlier and later cohorts of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to estimate the effect of marriage and childbearing on wages. Their estimates imply that marriage lowers female wages by between two and four percent in the year of marriage. Marriage also lowers...

In Lifecycle Events and Their Consequences: Job Loss, Family Change, and Declines in Health, editors Kenneth A. Couch, Mary C. Daly, and Julie Zissimopoulos bring together leading scholars to study the impact of unexpected life course events on economic welfare. The contributions in this volume...

Family composition has changed dramatically over the past 25 years. Divorce rates increased and remarriage rates declined. While considerable research established a link between marriage and earnings, far less is empirically understood about the effect of marriage on wealth although wealth is an...

Age at first mariage has risen dramatically since the mid-1960s among a wide spectrum of the U.S. population. Researchers have considered many possible explanations for this trend. Few, though, have asked why individuals should want to delay marriage in the first place. One possibility is that...