This paper provides an empirical analysis of how the U.S. Social Security and Medicare system affects the labor supply of older males in the presence of incomplete markets. The authors estimate a dynamic programming model of the joint labor supply and Social Security acceptance decision. The...

This paper presents a model of automobile choice by single vehicle households. This effort is distinguished from previous disaggregate automobile holdings models primarily by the use of the nested logit model rather than the more restrictive multinomial logit model. We present a 2-step...

The authors present an empirical model of optimal operation of nuclear power plants. The optimal lifetime is the solution to an optimal stopping problem: the plant is closed when the expected discounted losses from continued operation exceed the discounted costs of decommissioning. The authors...

This paper formulates a simple, regenerative, optimal-stopping model of bus-eng ine replacement to describe the behavior of Harold Zurcher, superinte ndent of maintenance at the Madison (Wisconsin) Metropolitan Bus Comp any. Admittedly, few people are likely to take particular interest in Harold...

We provide an empirical analysis of the Social Security disability application, award, and appeal process using the Health and Retirement Survey. We show that the appeal option increases the award probability from 46\% to 73\%. However, this comes at the cost of significant delays: the duration...

This paper compares the performance of the Howard (1960) policy iteration algorithm for infinite-horizon continuous-state Markovian decision processes (MDP's) using alternative random, quasi- random, and deterministic discretizations of the state space, or grids. Each grid corresponds to an...

We consider the problem of computing approximations to fixed points of quasilinear contraction mappings defined on the space of continuous functions of $d$ variables. Our main emphasis is on large d. Examples of such mappings include the Bellman operator from the theory of dynamic programming....