A popular solution to the looming entitlements crisis in the United States is to increase the eligibility age for Medicare. Using an empirical model of insurance choice with endogenous prices, I find that this would have a modest welfare cost. The losses are concentrated among those who lose Medicare coverage. For the non-elderly, the benefit of lower taxes is mitigated by a higher price for me...

This paper analyses the impact of economic growth on the incidence of chronic child malnutrition using data on spells of change. Growth is found to have a significant but small effect on chronic child malnutrition except in Sub-Saharan Africa, where it does not seem to have any impact. The estimates imply that outside of Africa, a doubling of income will reduce the incidence of chronic child ma...

This paper discusses estimation of causal effects of non-randomly assigned binary treatments on binary outcomes. The approach is full information maximum likelihood estimation of endogenously switching nonlinear regressions with a multivariate Student’s-t error structure. An application measures the effect of problem drinking on probability of employment. JEL Classification: I1, C3 I thank the ...

This paper examines the impact of sibling rivalry for resources on health outcomes by studying the effect of sibling composition and birth order on the height for age of children below ten years. The paper further tests whether relaxing resource constraints reduces the impact of sibling rivalry. This paper also examines sibling gender effect on the health outcomes for young boys and girls. JEL ...

The present paper thoroughly explores second-best efficient allocations in an adverse selection insurance economy. We start from a natural extension of the classical model, assuming less than perfect risk perceptions. We propose first and second welfare theorems, by means of which we describe efficiencyenhancing policies. Notions of weak and strong adverse selection are promising for interpreti...

ABSTRACT This paper examines the prevalence and benefits of upward social mobility in early accountancy profession by analyzing lifespan chartered accountants admitted to membership Scotland between 1853 1940. We find that 76 percent our sample experienced mobility, a greater percentage than found previous studies. The an average life expectancy premium approximately three years over general po...