The simple one-good model of life-cycle consumption requires "consumption smoothing." However, British and U.S. households apparently reduce consumption at retirement and the reduction cannot be explained by the life-cycle model. An interpretation is that retirees are surprised by the inadequacy...

Transfer payments to poor families are increasingly conditioned on work, either via wage subsidies available only to workers or via work requirements in more traditional welfare programs. Although the effects of such programs on employment are fairly well understood, relatively little is known...

This paper studies rates of saving and consumption among the recently retired during the 1980s. It also documents outlays associated with the death of a spouse to find the causes of wealth loss at widowhood.

In this paper, the author assesses the population health effects in Malaysia of air pollution generated by a widespread series of fires that occurred mainly in Indonesia between April and November of 1997. The author describes how the forest fires occurred and why the associated air pollution...

It is widely believed that health plays a major role in retirement decisions. The most important problem in including health in retirement models is the lack of availability of a good measure of health at the individual level in existing data sets. This problem is exacerbated when a model...

The authors examine ethnic differences in objective and perceived economic well-being in rural Guatemala. The evidence shows that long-standing ethnic differentials in objective indicators of household economic well-being actually widened between 1988 and 1995, a period characterized by rapid...

The goal of this paper is to analyze a model to explain consumption by couples. It is an extension fo the model for singles by Yaari (1195), and therefore emphasizes the role of mortality risk. It also allows for what I call a "true" bequest motive, bequeathing by a couple to the next...

Labor supply theory predicts systematic heterogeneity in the impact of recent welfare reforms on earnings, transfers, and income. Yet most welfare reform research focuses on mean impacts. We investigate the importance of heterogeneity using random-assignment data from Connecticut's Jobs First...

Peer interactions have been argued to play a major role in student academic achievement. Recent work has focused on measuring the structure of peer interactions with the location of the student in their social network and has found a positive relationship between student popularity and academic...

We exemine two potential modes of local empowerment: "dominance, " whereby each group is the majoriy of voters in single election districts ( reinforcing separative tendencies) , and "influence" whereby a group gains "influential minority" status in several districts ( reinforcing unifying...