The current practice of measuring age as years-since-birth distorts important behavior such as retirement, saving, and the discussion of dependency ratios. Two alternative measures of age are explored: mortality risk and remaining life expectancy. With these alternative measures, the huge wave...

The connection between the growth in hourly earnings inequality of individuals and changes in family earnings involves a number of issues: the movements in the employment of different family members, the association between changes in the earnings of the husband and those of the wife, and...

If workers in cooperatives are like workers in conventional workplaces, they care about the length of their working hours. In this paper, their choice of hours is characterized as a conventional labor supply decision and a familiar hours-wage relationship is derived. This is estimated using...

I investigate to what degree differences in retraining opportunities are responsible for the divergence of unemployment rates between the U.S. and Europe since the early 1980s. I provide some evidence for higher retraining rates in the U.S. as compared to Europe and further show that there is...

This paper has two goals. First, we discuss several emerging approaches to applied welfare analysis under non-standard (“behavioral”) assumptions concerning consumer choice. This provides a foundation for Behavioral Public Economics. Second, we illustrate applications of these approaches by...

All modern information and communications technology (ICT) industries use the platform organization. A platform in computing is a reconfigurable base of compatible components on which firms and users build applications. Applications share the general purpose components, which leads to the...

We investigate whether physicians’ financial incentives influence health care supply, technology diffusion, and resulting patient outcomes. In 1997, Medicare consolidated the geographic regions across which is adjusts physician payments, generating area-specific price shocks. Areas with higher...

Policy debates about the balance of vocational and general education programs focus on the school-to-work transition. But with rapid technological change, gains in youth employment from vocational education may be offset by less adaptability and thus diminished employment later in life. To test...

The Floor-Leverage Rule is a spending and investment strategy designed for retirees that can tolerate investment risk, but insist on sustainable spending. The rule calls for purchasing a spending guarantee with 85% of wealth and investing the remaining 15% in equities with 3x leverage....

We propose a tractable variant of the open economy neoclassical growth model that emphasizes political economy and contracting frictions. The political economy frictions involve disagreement and political turnover, while the contracting friction is a lack of commitment regarding foreign debt. We...