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...

The number of automobile recalls in the U.S. has sharply increased in the last decade and a half, and the number of units involved in these recalls are often counted in the millions. In 2006 alone, over 10.6 million vehicles were recalled in the United States. However, there is no quantitative...

Expected longevity is an important factor inuencing older individuals' decisions such as consumption, savings, purchase of life insurance and annuities, claiming of Social Security bene- fits, and labor supply. It has also been shown to be a good predictor of actual longevity, which in turn is...

This paper presents a dynamic model of labor/leisure, consumption/saving and annuity decisions over the life cycle. Such a dynamic model provides a framework for considering important policy experiments related to the reforms in Social Security. We address the role of labor supply in a life cyle...

This paper uses the only representative sample of the Russian Federation, the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, to estimate the returns to education in this ex-communist country. This is one of the first studies to tackle this classic issue in labor economics with the realistic expectation...

Unemployment rates in developed countries have recently reached levels not seen in a generation, and workers of all ages are facing increasing probabilities of losing their jobs and considerable losses in accumulated assets. These events have increased the reliance that most (older) workers have...

An increasing number of longitudinal data sets collect expectations information regarding a variety of future individual level events and decisions, providing researchers with the opportunity to explore expectations over micro variables in detail. We present a theoretical framework and an...