Boettner

The female reproductive system declines sharply before other aging-related health issues become prevalent; however, there has been little study to date on the economic impact of this male-female aging asymmetry. This project examines fecundity as “reproductive capital,” a depreciating asset that influences one’s financial well-being, and studies what happens when women lose this asset, and the impact of policies that slow its rate of depreciation.

In this project, we estimate the incidence effects of two types of exogenous shocks to the U.S. pharmaceutical market – supply shocks due to nationwide changes in pharmaceutical production market structure, and demand shocks further along in the supply chain induced by changes in regulated prescription drug coverage requirements. We study these effects in the market for prescription drugs purchased by enrollees in Medicare Part D.

In recent years, social scientists have increasingly become interested in the effects of grandparents on grandchildren’s demographic, educational and occupational outcomes, leading to the burgeoning literature on multigenerational effects. The growing interest in multigenerational effects reflects the aging trend and growing economic inequality under which grandparents’ roles for grandchildren’s demographic, educational, and economic outcomes may be increasingly relevant.

Prior research has shown that unemployment insurance (UI) reduces labor supply among younger workers, but it does not seem to do so for older workers. A potential explanation for the difference may be that the older population (age 40-60) faces consumption commitments in the form of goods involving transaction costs, so they are constrained from changing their consumption patterns frequently. The objective of this project is to investigate the effects of consumption commitments on labor supply and welfare.

The objective of this project is to learn what nurses know about retirement benefits and to better understand how variations across organizations employing nurses (hospitals, home care agencies, nursing homes, etc.) in benefits and other terms of employment affect the morale of nurses and their commitments to employers and careers in nursing. This will extend previous work that has surveyed nurses to understand the organizational factors that impede or enhance the practice of nursing, with respect to (a) the job satisfaction of nurses; and (b) the health of the patients for whom they care.

Retirement benefits under the US Social Security system are currently provided as a lifelong benefit stream, though some workers might be willing to trade a portion of their annuity streams un exchange for  lump sum amount. In a previous theoretical paper we explored whether allowing people to receive a lump sum as a payment for delayed retirement rather than as an addition to their lifetime Social Security benefits might induce them to work longer on a  voluntary basis.

This project will analyze how changing family status over the life cycle influences optimal portfolio choice, for stocks, bonds, life contingent-assets (life annuities and term life insurance). Prior models have not focused in much detail on the way in which changes in marital status and numbers of children might influence such investors behaviors.

Over the past decade, Medicare and Medicaid programs have contracted out an increasing share of their caseloads to private managed care plans, with over 25% of Medicare enrollees and over 60% of those in Medicaid currently covered through private provision (Gold 2012, KFF 2012). Privatization of Medicaid and Medicare services has been undertaken in attempt at cost savings and quality improvements.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate differences in prisoner outcomes between public and private prisons in the United States. Theory predicts that when the government contracts with private providers for services that have non-contractible quality, as in the case of privatized prisons, the private providers have an incentive to engage in too much cost reduction because they ignore the adverse effects of non-contractible quality (Hart, Shleifer and Vishny 1997).