This paper uses Roy's model of sorting behavior to study welfare implication of current health care data production infrastructure that relies on solicitation of research subjects. We show that due to severe adverse-selection issues, directionality of bias cannot be established and welfare may...

This paper builds on the methods of local instrumental variables developed by Heckman and Vytlacil (1999, 2001, 2005) to estimate person-centered treatment (PeT) effects that are conditioned on the person's observed characteristics and averaged over the potential conditional distribution of...

The United States aspires to use information from comparative effectiveness research (CER) to reduce waste and contain costs without instituting a formal rationing mechanism or compromising patient or physician autonomy with regard to treatment choices. With such ambitious goals, traditional...

The stock market crash eliminated more than $2 trillion in wealth held in defined contribution retirement accounts, about one-third of the pre-crash total. Unless offset by a later retirement age and/or increased retirement saving, this wealth shock will significantly reduce the retirement...

In July and August 2009, the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College (CRR) conducted a survey to gauge three things: 1) how people were responding to the loss of their retirement assets due to the financial crisis; 2) who was responding by increasing their expected working life; and 3)...

This study calculates the impact of federal income taxes on the progressiveness of the Old Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) program. It uses the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) data linked with the Social Security Earnings Records to estimate OASI contributions and benefits for individuals...