The 1996 PRWORA reform introduced time limits on the receipt of welfare in the United States. We use variation by state and across demographic groups to provide reduced form evidence showing that such limits led to a fall in welfare claims (partly due to "banking" benefits for future use), a...

This paper develops a model of marriage, labor supply, savings and divorce under limited commitment and uses it to understand the impact of major welfare reforms, including the time-limited eligibility in the TANF program. In the model, taxes and welfare can affect whether marriage and divorce...

We define the distinction between productivity and employment risk and estimate the components of risk using wage and mobility data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We then calibrate a model of intertemporal consumption and labor supply and study the effect of the two sources of risk on...

We use longitudinal data on consumption, disability status, disability insurance recipiency, and earnings to measure the welfare loss of disability shocks. We decompose earnings risk into shocks due to the emergency of disability and shocks to general productivity. We then examine the issue of...

This paper provides a life-cycle framework for weighing up the insurance value of disability benefits against the incentive cost. Within this framework, we estimate the life-cycle risks that individuals face in the US, as well as the parameters governing the disability insurance program, using...