The early-1970s abortion legalization led to a significant drop in fertility. We investigate whether this decline represented a delay in births or a permanent reduction in fertility. We combine Census and Vital Statistics data to compare the lifetime fertility of women born in early-legalizing...

Religion plays an important role in the lives of many Americans, but there is relatively little study by economists of the implications of religiosity for economic outcomes. This likely reflects the enormous difficulty inherent in separating the causal effects of religiosity from other factors...

One popular option for health care reform in the U.S. is to make particular groups, such as children, eligible for public health insurance coverage. A key question in assessing the cost of this option is the extent to which public eligibility will crowd out the private insurance coverage of...

One of the major social policy issues facing the U.S. in the first decade of the 21st century is the large number of Americans lacking health insurance. This article surveys the major economic issues around covering the uninsured. I review the facts on insurance coverage and the nature of the...

The largest entitlement program in the United States today is the Social Security program (SS). We provide an overview of the interaction between the SS system and retirement behavior. We begin by documenting historical trends in labor force participation and program receipt, and contemporaneous...

This paper provides a critical review of the empirical literature on the relationship between health insurance, labor supply, and job mobility. We review over 50 papers on this topic, almost exclusively written in the last 10 years. We reach five conclusions. First, there is clear and...

Disability Insurance (DI), which provides income support to disabled workers, has been criticized for inducing a large fall in the labor force participation rate of older workers. We study the effects of one policy response designed to address this moral hazard problem: raising the rate at which...

While there is a large literature investigating the response of treatment intensity to Medicare reimbursement differentials, there is much less work on this question for the Medicaid program. The answers for Medicare may not apply in the Medicaid context, since a smaller share of physician's...

The last ten years have seen the introduction of price shopping into medical markets which were previously dominated by price insensitive consumers. Price shopping has been facilitated by the advent of the Preferred Provider Organization (PPO), which coordinates the demand of a large number of...

We present a detailed analysis of the incentives that Social Security provides for continued work at older ages. We do so using information on older males from the Health and Retirement Study over the 1980-1997 period to calculate the changes in the present discounted value of Social Security...