The Growing Socioeconomic Gap in Lifetime Social Security Retirement Benefits: Current and Future Retirees.

Objectives: Increasing socioeconomic disparities, including in life expectancy, have important implications for the U.S. Social Security program.

Early evidence of the impacts of COVID-19 on minority unemployment.

This paper provides early evidence of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on minority unemployment in the United States. In the first month following March adoptions of social distancing measures by states, unemployment rose to 14.5% but a much higher 24.

The Distributional Impact of Social Security Policy Options.

Using microsimulation, we estimate the effects of three policy proposals that would alter Social Security's eligibility rules or benefit structure to reflect changes in women's labor force activity, marital patterns, and differential mortality among the aged. First, we estimate a set of options related to the duration of marriage required to receive divorced spouse and survivor benefits. Second, we estimate the effects of an earnings sharing proposal with survivor benefits, in which benefits are based entirely on earned benefits with spouses sharing their earnings during years of marriage.

Work Disability among Women: The Role of Divorce in a Retrospective Cohort Study.

We assess how divorce through midlife affects the subsequent probability of work-limiting health among U.S. women.

The Long-Term Health Implications of Marital Disruption: Divorce, Work Limits, and Social Security Disability Benefits Among Men.

We provide new evidence on the long-term impact of divorce on work disability among U.S. men.

Impact of welfare reform on mortality: an evaluation of the Connecticut jobs first program, a randomized controlled trial.

Objectives: We examined whether Jobs First, a multicenter randomized trial of a welfare reform program conducted in Connecticut, demonstrated increases in employment, income, and health insurance relative to traditional welfare (Aid to Families with Dependent Children). We also investigated if higher earnings and employment improved mortality of the participants.

Methods: We revisited the Jobs First randomized trial, successfully linking 4612 participant identifiers to 15 years of prospective mortality follow-up data through 2010, producing 240 deaths.

Last hired, first fired? Black-white unemployment and the business cycle.

Studies have tested the claim that blacks are the last hired during periods of economic growth and the first fired in recessions by examining the movement of relative unemployment rates over the business cycle. Any conclusion drawn from this type of analysis must be viewed as tentative because cyclical movements in the underlying transitions into and out of unemployment are not examined. Using Current Population Survey data matched across adjacent months from 1989-2004, this article provides the first detailed examination of labor market transitions for prime-age black and white men to test the last hired, first fired hypothesis.

A longitudinal analysis of family migration and the gender gap in earnings in the United States and Great Britain.

This article uses longitudinal data for the United States and Great Britain to examine the impact of residential mobility and childbirth on the earnings of women, their family earnings, and the related division of earnings by gender. This project is the first to compare explicitly the impact of childbirth and family migration on women's earnings, and it extends prior cross-sectional and longitudinal studies on isolated countries by providing a direct contrast between two major industrialized nations, using comparable measures. The results indicate that families respond in similar ways in both countries to migration and childbirth.