Are early Social Security claimers too sick to work? We linked Health and Retirement Study data to Medicare claims to study health care utilization at ages 65 and 70. We find that Social Security Disability Insurance recipients use more health care on average than those who never received DI. At...

Older adults have the highest rates of many health conditions for which medical marijuana may be effective in moderating symptoms and are at elevated risk of reducing labor supply due to poor health. Surprisingly little is known about how this group responds to medical marijuana laws. We provide...

The rate of application for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) benefits, as well as the number of beneficiaries has been increasing for the past several decades, threatening the solvency of the SSDI program. One possible remedy is to promote continued employment amongst those...

Objective. To assess relationships between changes in Medicare Advantage (MA) payment rates and Medicare beneficiary hospitalizations and to simulate the effects of scheduled payment cuts on ambulatory care sensitive and elective hospitalization rates. Data. State Inpatient Database discharge...

We use Health and Retirement Study data linked to the Department of Labor’s O*Net classification system to examine the relationship between lifetime exposure to occupational demands and retirement behavior. We consistently found that both non-routine cognitive analytic and non-routine physical...

Are early Social Security claimers too sick to work? We linked Health and Retirement Study data to Medicare claims to study health care utilization at ages 65 and 70. We find that Social Security Disability Insurance recipients use more health care on average than those who never received DI. At...

Prior research indicates that retirees with less cognitive ability are at greater financial risk because they have lower incomes yet higher medical expenditures. Linking HRS data to administrative records, we evaluate two hypotheses about why this group spends more on health: (1) they are in...

Diabetes is rapidly escalating amongst low-income, older adults at great cost to the Medicare program. I use longitudinal survey data from the Health and Retirement Study linked to administrative Medicare records and biomarker data to assess the relationship between Food Stamp receipt and...

Informal care is the largest source of long-term care for elderly, surpassing home health care and nursing home care. By definition, informal care is unpaid. It remains a puzzle why so many adult children give freely of their time. Transfers of time to the older generation may be balanced by...

Diabetes is rapidly escalating amongst low-income, older adults at great cost to the Medicare program. We use longitudinal survey data from the Health and Retirement Study linked to administrative Medicare records and biomarker data to assess the relationship between Food Stamp receipt and...