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).

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), national health reform passed in 2010, is intended to expand health insurance coverage to near-universal levels. While unprecedented on the national level, a similar reform was implemented in Massachusetts in 2006. The Massachusetts health reform and the PPACA are nearly identical in their key elements.

Millions of unorganized and informal sector workers in the developing world are excluded from formal pension and social security systems. Old-age economic security is a pertinent problem for such population groups and providing adequate and secure income flows in the future is a formidable challenge.

First, the demand for insurance in rural economies is complex and not well understood. Rural households face a number of significant risks, one of the most important being crop failure from drought or excessive rain. When these events occur, common coping mechanisms such as informal insurance, credit or increased labor supply are not effective because the shock adversely affects all households in a given region. In theory, these households can obtain insurance for weather-related shocks by accessing larger financial markets.

Population aging has put a fiscal strain on the Social Security system of many countries. One of the main policy responses has been to move from a Defined Benefit (DB) to a Defined Contribution (DC) Social Security system. How this change would affect saving and labor supply is crucial for evaluating the desirability of such a reform. While there is substantial existing work on how the size of Social Security benefits impacts economic outcomes (e.g.

Income risk is arguably the largest source of risk people face and may carry substantial welfare costs. Income volatility, defined as the variance of squared income changes, can be used to measure income risk. There has been a great deal of recent interest in the evolution of income volatility (Dahl, DeLeire, and Schwabish, 2007; Dynan, Elmendorf, and Sichel, 2007; Gottschalk and Moffitt, 1994, 2002; Hacker, 2006). A popular conclusion of this research is that income changes have gotten larger over time.