The proposed project aims to analyze recent trends in occupational segregation in the United States by gender, race, nativity, and education, specifically focusing on detailed occupation levels since the 2000s. The research team will also examine the relationship between segregation and job characteristics such as skills, on-the-job training, job quality, preferred entry level education, work tasks, and work environments.

Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is one of the most pronounced public health concerns in the U.S. and cause an enormous burden to the society. In 2019, 14.5 million people of age 12 and older have AUD but only 7.2% of them had received treatment in the past year. Moreover, AUD may be correlated with cognitive decline and dementia could be a onerous burden to Individuals, family members, and the society. Both alcohol consumption and cognitive decline are often correlated to many unoberved factors such as genetics, personality traits, and risk perception therefore resulting in endogneity concerns.

Every year, thousands of consumers try to improve their well-being by setting goals, such as losing weight (Martin et al., 2018). More often than not, these goals are unsuccessful (i.e., Tsai & Wadden, 2005; Wadden et al., 2004; Young et al, 2012). One reason this might happen is that “small failures” derail people. Throughout long term goal pursuit, it is inevitable that people will experience a small failure along the way. Some days it might be impossible to make it to the gym, or some days you might have to splurge on that dessert.

There is substantial heterogeneity in both financial sophistication and returns to wealth across households in the United States. More sophisticated households fare better in the capital market. Households accumulate financial sophistication over their life span by cultivating their understanding of financial information, developing investment skills and experiences, and expanding access to investment opportunities, which all result in disparate financial decisions and outcomes.

The proposed project aims to develop a new data infrastructure (OccLink) that integrates different sources of occupational information and complements data currently available about occupations from the decennial U.S. Census, American Community Survey, and other surveys. The project offers future researchers the ability to utilize longitudinal data from U.S. government archival and administrative sources on occupations, jobs, and workforce (1939-2020).

A large and growing literature shows that attention-increasing interventions, such as reminders and planning prompts, can promote important behaviors. Our project develops a method to investigate whether people value attention-increasing tools rationally. We characterize how the demand for attention improvements must vary with the pecuniary incentive to be attentive and develop quantitative tests of rational inattention. In our first round of data collection, we deployed this method in two experiments.

The overall aim of this pilot project that utilizes data from the Mature Adults Cohort of the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health, MLSFH-MAC)1 is to understand social interactions about aging and non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in low-income countries (LICs), identify social processes affecting health-knowledge and health-seeking behavior related to NCDs, and provide evidence that will inform innovative intervention designs that leverage social dynamics to reduce NCD risk through sustained behavioral changes and linkages-to-care for older people in a LICs context.

This project will extend the prevailing framework to show how to compute the optimal capital income tax when the Atkinson–Stiglitz conditions fail. Specifically, we show how to estimate a key sufficient statistic for between-income preference heterogeneity which governs optimal capital tax rates. When this statistic happens to be zero, the Atkinson–Stiglitz result obtains, but more generally, this statistic allows for the calculation of the optimal non-zero capital income tax.

The federal government is facing intense financial pressure as the Medicare program approaches insolvency in 2026 due to an aging population. In this project, we examine the value generated by a cornerstone Medicare program, Medicare Advantage, the private plan option that has rapidly expanded to cover over 22 million beneficiaries.

Mounting evidence has documented that default retirement saving policies significantly increase both retirement savings (Madrian and Shea, 2001) and total savings (Chetty et al. 2009). One key question that remains unanswered is where the increased savings come from. It can be either from reduced consumption or from increased debt. If individuals save more by budgeting their pre-retirement consumption, the default policies effectively promote lifetime individual welfare by smoothing their income over time.