Our research fleshes out econometric details of examining possible social interactions in labor supply. We look for a response of a person's hours worked to hours worked in the labor market reference group, which includes those with similar age, family structure, and location. We identify...

Spring 2007 (Revised from May 2006). In this paper we ask, how do individual and community factors influence the average length of poverty spells? We measure local economic conditions by the county unemployment rate and neighborhood spillover effects by the racial makeup and poverty rate of the...

We examine differences in the value of statistical life (VSL) across potential wage levels in panel data using quantile regressions with intercept heterogeneity. Latent heterogeneity is econometrically important and affects the estimated VSL. Our findings indicate that a reasonable average cost...

Our research addresses fundamental long-standing concerns in the compensating wage differentials literature and its public policy implications: the econometric properties of estimates of the value of statistical life (VSL) and the wide range of such estimates from about $0 to almost $30 million....

With an annual budget of about $400 million, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is about 5 percent the size of the Environmental Protection Agency, another federal agency created by President Richard M. Nixon in 1970, the "Year of the Environment." Nearly all workers in the...

Our research addresses fundamental long-standing concerns in the compensating wage differentials literature and its public policy implications: the econometric properties of estimates of the value of statistical life (VSL) and the wide range of such estimates from about $0.5 million to about $21...

Studies of industrial safety regulations, Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in particular, often find little effect on worker safety. Critics of the regulatory approach argue that safety standards have little to do with industrial injuries and defenders of the regulatory...

A fundamental property of a progressive income tax is that it provides implicit insurance against shocks to income by dampening the variability of disposable income and consumption. The Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 (ERTA) in combination with the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA86) greatly...

Although chronically ill individuals need protection against high medical expenses, they often have difficulty obtaining adequate insurance coverage due to medical underwriting practices used to classify and price risks and to define and limit coverage for individuals and groups. Using data from...

We examine job duration patterns for evidence of health insurance-related job lock among chronically ill workers or workers with a chronically ill family member. Using Cox proportional hazard models, we allow for more general insurance effects than in the existing literature to indicate the...