Recent Trends in Resource Sharing Among the Poor

Motivated in part by the dramatic changes in the United States economy and public assistance policies, many researchers have examined the changes in the resources of the low-income population over the last two decades, with particular attention paid to income from earnings and public assistance programs. One source of income that has received comparatively little attention is income from private transfers. However, private transfers may be a key source of support for low-income individuals, especially for those who have had little attachment to the labor force or who have experienced reductions in public assistance. In this paper, we provide a conceptual discussion of private transfers drawing on several related literatures and provide new empirical evidence regarding the significance of private of transfers as a source income. We find that private transfers are an important source of income for many less-skilled households, the contribution of private transfers to total income has increased over time, and shared living arrangements are a common mechanism for providing assistance.

How Important Are Wages to the Elderly? Evidence from the New Beneficiary Data System and the Social Security Earnings Test

More than 40 percent of Social Security beneficiaries continue to work after age 65. This research investigates the extent to which these individuals substitute labor across periods in response to anticipated wage changes induced by the Social Security earnings test. While we find that a disproportionate number of individuals choose earnings within a few percentage points of the earnings limit, we find no evidence that these individuals substitute labor supply between

Econometric Studies of Long-Run Earnings Inequality: Dissertation Summary

My dissertation comprises three econometric studies of long-run earnings inequality. Two studies are empirical analyses of U.S. data, one contributing to the well-established literature on male earnings inequality and the other extending the analysis to the understudied level of families. These empirical chapters focus on documenting trends in long-run earnings inequality and evaluating the potential causes. The third study develops an econometric technique that is necessary to complete the empirical analyses, specifically, how to use a Generalized Method of Moments estimator with an incomplete data set. Because this estimator is becoming increasingly popular and because researchers often face the prospect of using incomplete data, the study will be useful to the applied researcher

The Economic Status of Elderly Divorced Women

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Unexplained Gaps and Oaxaca-Blinder Decompositions

We analyze four methods to measure unexplained gaps in mean outcomes: three decompositions based on the seminal work of Oaxaca (1973) and Blinder (1973) and an approach involving a seemingly naïve regression that includes a group indicator variable. Our analysis yields two principal findings. We show that the coefficient on a group indicator variable from an OLS regression is an attractive approach for obtaining a single measure of the unexplained gap. We also show that a commonly-used pooling decomposition systematically overstates the contribution of observable characteristics to mean outcome differences when compared to OLS regression, therefore understating unexplained differences. We then provide three empirical examples that explore the practical importance of our analytic results.discrimination, decompositions

The Effectiveness of Policies that Promote Labor Force Participation of Women with Children: A Collection of National Studies

Numerous countries have enacted policies to promote the labor force participation of women around the years of childbearing, and unsurprisingly, many research articles have been devoted to evaluating their effectiveness. Perhaps more surprisingly, however, six such articles were submitted independently over several months to Labour Economics and subsequently made it through the normal review process. These articles are collected in the Special Section that follows. This article provides additional background to facilitate the understanding of the policies that are evaluated in the Special Section articles and, more importantly, a discussion of what can be learned from the articles as a collection. Taken together, the articles are quite informative in demonstrating how the effectiveness of policies can vary across different national contexts and how this variation itself can be usefully examined with the standard theoretical framework

How Accurate are Expected Retirement Savings?

This paper examines the ability of workers nearing retirement to report their expected retirement savings, where retirement savings refers to funds held in savings, checking, and investment-type accounts. Responding to such a question is likely to be difficult, even for those who are near retirement, because it requires respondents to assess when they will retire, their likely income stream between the survey date and retirement, and what portfolio choices will be made at retirement. Based on two nationally representative surveys collected two decades apart, we find that most individuals provide some response to the question, particularly when they are allowed to provide a range. Moreover, the responses that are given have substantial predictive power for actual retirement savings, even when compared to the savings in the initial wave. Despite this predictive power, there is evidence that responses do not satisfy the more stringent requirements of the rational expectations hypothesis.Social Security Administrationhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/49395/1/wp128.pd