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Working Paper
End-of-Life Medical Expenses
In this review, we document end-of-life medical spending: its level, composition, funding, and contribution to aggregate medical spending. We discuss how end-of-life expenses affect household behavior and economic evidence on the efficacy of medical spending at the end of life. Finally, we document recent trends in health and chronic disease at older ages and discuss what they might imply for end-of-life spending and medical spending in the aggregate.
Newsletter
Financial life after the death of a spouse
The death of a spouse results in a considerable decline in average income for the surviving spouse. The Social Security survivors benefits program compensates the surviving spouse, most often a woman, for almost all of the lost income, allowing them to work less, but many widows who are not yet eligible for the program struggle to meet their financial needs.
Working Paper
The Implications of Labor Market Heterogeneity on Unemployment Insurance Design
We digitize state-level and time-varying unemployment insurance (UI) laws on initial eligibility, payment amount, and payment duration and combine them with microdata on labor market outcomes to estimate UI eligibility, take-up, and replacement rates at the individual level. We document how levels of income and wealth affect unemployment risk, eligibility, take-up, and replacement rates both upon job loss and over the course of unemployment spells. We evaluate whether these empirical findings are important for shaping UI policy design using a general equilibrium incomplete markets model ...
Working Paper
The Implications of Labor Market Heterogeneity on Unemployment Insurance Design
We digitize state-level and time-varying unemployment insurance (UI) laws on initial eligibility, payment amount, and payment duration and combine them with microdata on labor market outcomes to estimate UI eligibility, take-up, and replacement rates at the individual level. We document how levels of income and wealth affect unemployment risk, eligibility,take-up, and replacement rates both upon job loss and over the course of unemployment spells. We evaluate whether these empirical findings are important for shaping UI policy design using a general equilibrium incomplete markets model ...
Working Paper
Spousal Labor Supply Response to Job Displacement and Implications for Optimal Transfers
I document a small spousal earnings response to the job displacement of the family head. The response is even smaller in recessions, when earnings losses are larger and additional insurance is valuable. Using cross-state differences in transfer generosity, I find that generous transfers substantially crowd out the spousal earnings response. To study its policy implications, I develop an incomplete markets model with family labor supply and aggregate fluctuations, where predicted labor supply elasticities to taxes and transfers are in line with empirical estimates both in aggregate and across ...
Working Paper
The Implications of Labor Market Heterogeneity on Unemployment Insurance Design
We digitize state-level and time-varying unemployment insurance (UI) laws on eligibility, payment amount, and payment duration and combine them with microdata to estimate UI eligibility, take-up, and replacement rates at the individual level. We document how income and wealth levels affect unemployment risk, eligibility, take-up, and replacement rates over the course of unemployment. We evaluate whether these findings are important for shaping UI policy design using a general-equilibrium incomplete-markets model with a frictional labor market that matches our empirical findings. We show that ...