This paper examines the impact of public health insurance expansions through both Medicaid and SCHIP on children's educational outcomes, measured by 4th and 8th grade reading and math test scores, available from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). We use a triple difference...

We examine the empirical relationship between socioeconomic disadvantage and rates of early childbearing. First, we use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to confirm a strong correlation at the individual level - women who grow up "disadvantaged" are much more likely to give...

This paper examines the impact of recent state-level Medicaid policy changes that expanded eligibility for family planning services to higher income women and to Medicaid clients whose benefits would expire otherwise. We begin by establishing that the income-based policy change led to a...

This paper examines how unemployment affects retirement and whether the Unemployment Insurance (UI) system and Social Security (SS) system affect how older workers respond to labor market shocks. To do so, we use pooled cross-sectional data from the March Current Population Survey (CPS) as well...

The introduction of legalized abortion in the early 1970s led to dramatic changes in fertility behavior. Some research has suggested as well that there were important impacts on cohort outcomes, but this literature has been limited and controversial. In this paper, we provide a framework for...

The historic boom and bust in the stock market over the past decade had the potential to significantly alter the retirement behavior of older workers. Previous research examining the impact of wealth shocks on labor supply supports the plausibility of this hypothesis. In this paper, we examine...

Previous research has convincingly shown that abortion legalization in the early 1970s led to a significant drop in fertility at that time. But this decline may have either represented a delay in births from a point where they were have represented a permanent reduction in fertility. We combine...

This paper views abortion access as an insurance policy that protects women from unwanted pregnancies. Within this framework, we present a theoretical model where greater access provides value in the form of insurance against unwanted births and also reduces the incentive to avoid pregnancy....

This paper investigates whether children are more or less likely to be overweight if their mothers work. The prevalence of both overweight children and working mothers has risen dramatically over the past few decades, although these parallel trends may be coincidental. The goal of this paper is...

This paper uses data from the 1993 National Survey of Small Business Finances to determine the extent to which minority-owned small businesses face constraints in the credit market beyond those faced by white-owned small businesses. First, we present qualitative evidence indicating that black-...