Dan Silverman

The effect of adolescent experience on labor market outcomes: The case of height

Taller workers receive a wage premium. Net of differences in family background, the disparity is similar in magnitude to the race and gender gaps. We exploit variation in an individual’s height over time to explore how height affects wages. Controlling for teen height essentially eliminates the effect of adult height on wages for white men. The teen height premium is not explained by differences in resources or endowments. The teen height premium is partially mediated through participation in high school sports and clubs. We estimate the monetary benefits of a medical treatment for children that increases height.

The Effect of Adolescent Experience on Labor Market Outcomes: The Case of Height

Aluminum or aluminum foil is placed in communication with the interior of a cold cathode gas discharge display chamber to prevent undesirable quantities of mercury from entering the display chamber and to absorb undesirable O2 and H2O which may evolve during the life of the display device.

Harnessing naturally occurring data to measure the response of spending to income

Balancing your incomings and outgoings Economic theory predicts that when someone receives money should have little effect on their spending patterns. Gelman et al. constructed a data set of 60 million transactions made by 75,000 people to test this theory. People do seem to go on a mini–spending spree after they get their paychecks or pensions. However, closer inspection reveals that thats mostly explained by the convenience of linking regular payments, such as rent and utilities, to regular income. Unsurprisingly, cash-strapped people are more likely to increase their spending in response to receiving income. Science, this issue p. 212 How do theoretical predictions of individual fiscal behaviors match up against real-world, real-time data? This paper presents a new data infrastructure for measuring economic activity. The infrastructure records transactions and account balances, yielding measurements with scope and accuracy that have little precedent in economics. The data are drawn from a diverse population that overrepresents males and younger adults but contains large numbers of underrepresented groups. The data infrastructure permits evaluation of a benchmark theory in economics that predicts that individuals should use a combination of cash management, saving, and borrowing to make the timing of income irrelevant for the timing of spending. As in previous studies and in contrast to the predictions of the theory, there is a response of spending to the arrival of anticipated income. The data also show, however, that this apparent excess sensitivity of spending results largely from the coincident timing of regular income and regular spending. The remaining excess sensitivity is concentrated among individuals with less liquidity.

On the compassion of time-limited welfare programs

Supporters of recent welfare reforms argue that time limits and other eligibility restrictions serve recipients. We present a simple model of agents with present-biased preferences to investigate the theoretical validity of this claim. We first identify four types of outcome that describe the behavior of a present-biased agent in the absence of time limits. We then show that the behavioral consequences of time limits are contingent on which outcome characterizes the agent’s behavior in the absence of time limits. We show that under some conditions the imposition of time limits may improve the wellbeing of welfare recipients evaluated both in terms of long-run, time-consistent utility and the periodone self’s utility. This benefit of time limits may come either from allowing the welfare eligible to start working earlier than they otherwise would or, contrary to the intent of the reforms, from allowing them to postpone working. D 2002 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Factions and Political Competition

This paper presents a new model of political competition in which candidates belong to factions. Before elections, factions compete to direct local public goods to their local constituencies. The model of factional competition delivers a rich set of implications relating the internal organization of the party to the allocation of resources. In doing so, the model provides a unified explanation of two prominent features of public resource allocations: the persistence of (possibly inefficient) policies and the tendency of public spending to favor incumbent party strongholds over swing constituencies.

Consumption Commitments and Preferences for Risk

We examine an economy in which the cost of consuming some goods can be reduced by making commitments to consumption levels that do not vary across states. For example, moral hazard and matching considerations may make it cheaper to produce housing services via owner-occupied than rented housing, but the transactions costs associated with the former may compel consumers to adopt a realtively inflexible housing consumptin plan. We show that consumption commitments can cause risk-neutral consumers to care a great deal about risk, creating an incentive to insure risks and to bunch uninsured risks together. As a result, workers may preger to avoid wage risk while bearing an unemployment risk that is concentrated in as few states as possible. The interaction between consumptin and labor markets may give rise to multiple equilibria. The basic predictions of the model are compared with corresponding moments of US data on layoff risk and housing consumption.

Consumption, Retirement, and Social Security: Evaluating the Efficiency of Reform with a Life-Cycle Model

This paper analyzes the effect of a potential reform to the Social Security system on individuals’ retirement and consumption choices. We first estimate the coefficients for a life-cycle model. We assume intratemporally nonseparable preference orderings and endogenous retirement. Our framework allows the possibility of disability. The specification predicts a change in consumption at retirement; we use the empirical magnitude of the change, together with desired retirement age, to identify key parameters such as the curvature of the utility function. We then qualitatively and quantitatively study the possible long-run effect of a Social Security reform in which individuals no longer face the OASI payroll tax after some specified age, and their subsequent earnings have no bearing on their Social Security benefits. Simulations indicate that retirement ages would rise by as much as one year, equivalent variations could average

An old measure of decision-making quality sheds new light on paternalism

5000 (1984 dollars) per household or more, and reform could generate

Cognitive Ability and Retiree Health Care Expenditure

2500 or more additional income tax revenue per household.

Annuitized Wealth and Post-Retirement Saving

Definitive judgment about the quality of decision-making is made difficult by twin problems of measurement and identification. A measure of decision-making quality is hard to formalize, to quantify, and to make practical for use in a variety of choice environments; and it is difficult to distinguish differences in decision-making quality from unobserved differences in preferences, information, beliefs, or constraints. In this paper, we describe a widely applicable set of tools for theoretical analysis and experimental methods for addressing these problems. These tools and methods can indicate a more targeted approach to ilight paternalismj polices aimed at improving decision-making quality.