The objective of this paper is to estimate the causal effect of retirement on health care utilization. To do so, we use data from the 1992-2008 waves of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and the 2004-2006 waves of the Survey of Health, Aging, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). In particular,...

Low take-up by elderly Americans in most means-tested federal programs is a persistent and puzzling phenomenon. This paper seeks to measure the causal effect of the benefit levels on elderly enrollment in two public assistance programs – the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and...

This paper examines the impact of the Massachusetts Health Insurance reform of 2016 on job mobility and employment exit using administrative data from the Social Security Administration. The Massachusetts reform mandated that every resident have insurance coverage and facilitated this initiative...

Long-term care expenditures represent one of the largest uninsured financial risks facing the elderly. Medicaid provides incomplete insurance against these costs: unlimited nursing home benefits with a deductible equal to the savings and income above the means-testing limits. This paper exploits...

Taxing sweetened beverages has emerged as an important and effective policy for addressing their overconsumption. However, taxes may place a greater economic burden on people with lower incomes. We assess the degree to which sweetened beverage taxes in three large US cities placed an inequitable...

Nursing homes have been caught in the crosshairs of the coronavirus pandemic. As of early May 2020, Covid-19 had claimed the lives of more than 28,000 nursing home residents and staff in the United States. But U.S. nursing homes were unstable even before Covid-19 hit. The tragedy unfolding in...

Alternative payment models have been proposed as a solution to the high costs of health care. While these models typically decrease consumption of formal post-acute care, they may result in a compensatory increase in the need for and use of informal or family caregiving. We estimate the effect...

Cross-sectional evidence in the United States finds that informal caregivers have less attachment to the labor force, measured both by the number of hours worked and labor force participation. The causal mechanism is unclear: do children who work less become informal caregivers, or are children...

The increase in the full retirement age in the Social Security program provides exogenous variation in the generosity in the Disability Insurance program, based only on birth year. We exploit this variation to estimate how responsive SSDI applications are to the financial incentive to apply. We...

Using consumption and wealth data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), this paper explores the impact of children leaving home on household consumption. We find that households maintain their household-level consumption, despite the fact that the number of individuals in the household has...