Once retired from a career job, individuals must live off savings, Social Security, and pensions or earnings from post-retirement work. Those who have made adequate plans for retirement are more likely to be able to meet their desired levels of consumption once retired and are less likely to end...

Population aging is widely expected to have detrimental effects on aggregate economic growth. However, we have little empirical evidence about the actual existence or magnitude of such effects. In this paper, we exploit differential aging patterns at the state level in the United States between...

Populations throughout the developed world are aging in response to low fertility rates and increases in longevity. Delaying retirement becomes increasingly important to individuals as they must confront the need to finance more years in retirement while governments are concerned about the cost...

In 2005, as the result of a World Trade Organization mandate, India began to implement product patents for pharmaceuticals that were compliant with the 1995 Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). We combine pharmaceutical product sales data for India with a newly gathered...

We analyze the labor market effects of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ Disability Compensation (DC) program. The largely unstudied DC program currently provides income and health insurance to approximately four million veterans of military service who have service-connected...

The paper evaluates heterogeneous effect of participation in a residency matching program and changeover from fee-for-service to a prospective payment system on labor returns and economies of scale at acute-care public hospitals in Japan. A range of frontier technologies for multi-product output...

This policy study uses U.S. Census microdata to evaluate how subsidies for universal telephone service vary in their impact across low-income racial groups, gender, age, and home ownership. Our demand specification includes both the subsidized monthly price (Lifeline program) and the subsidized...

We estimate the economic surplus created by Medicare Advantage under its reformed competitive bidding rules. We use data on the universe of Medicare beneficiaries, and develop a model of plan bidding that accounts for both market power and risk selection. We find that private plans have costs...

New mobile development platforms are a 21st-century growth pole. By successfully recombining existing information technologies with new innovations, they have spurred a positive feedback loop of consumer adoption of mobile devices and firm entry into a wide variety of applications, or...

We estimate how physicians’ financial incentives affect their treatment choices in heart attack management, using a large dataset of private health insurance claims. Different insurance plans pay physicians different amounts for the same services, generating the required variation in...