This paper studies the effects of health shocks on the demand for health insurance and annuities, along with precautionary saving in a dynamic life-cycle model. I argue that when the health shock can simultaneously increase health expenses and reduce longevity, rational agents would neither...

In this paper, I extend the Barro–Becker model of endogenous fertility to incorporate specific fiscal policies and use it to study the effects of the fiscal policy changes following WWII on fertility in the United States. The US government went through large changes in fiscal policy after the...

This paper studies the impact of social insurance on individual choices and welfare in a dynamic general equilibrium model with uncertain medical expenses and individual health insurance choices. I find that social insurance (modeled as the combination of a minimum consumption floor and the...

Economists and demographers have long argued that fertility differs by income (differential fertility), and that social security creates incentives for people to rear fewer children. Does the effect of social security on fertility differ by income? How does social security change the...

We study the impact of the U.S. employment-based health insurance system on the employment rate, the shares of full-time/part-time workers, and aggregate hours worked in a general equilibrium life cycle model with incomplete markets and idiosyncratic risks in both income and medical expenses. In...

We develop a two-sector growth model of vertical structure in which the upstream sector features Cournot competition and produces intermediate goods that are used in the downstream sector for the production of final goods. In such a vertical structure, we show that deregulation and increased...

The share of wealth held by the top one percent of Americans has increased from about 24% in 1980 to 40% in 2010. This paper examines the potential role played by three factors in accounting for this increase - decline in the corporate tax rates, increase in the income risk, and the decline in...

A general equilibrium model that properly captures the risks in old age, the role of family insurance, changes in demographics, and the productivity growth rate is capable of generating changes in the national saving rate in China that mimic the data well. Our findings suggest that the...

Using a dynamic panel approach, we provide empirical evidence that negative health shocks reduce earnings. The effect is primarily driven by the participation margin and is concentrated in less educated individuals and those with poor health. We build a dynamic, general equilibrium, life cycle...