The purpose of this study is to investigate race/ethnic differences in disability in the United States with an emphasis on immigrant populations and their U.S. born counterparts. The study utilizes the 5% PUMS sample from the 2000 Census of Population; the 2000 Census included a new set of questions on disability. The Census provides the most comprehensive information on race/ethnicity available in US data sources and the size of the 5% sample makes the Census the only data source that permits detailed analyses of health status among smaller race/ethnic subgroups in the United States.

In this project we plan to explore the determinants of fertility and in particular of the relation between education, wages and fertility. In order to do this we build a model of household formation, where males and females choose whether to marry and how many children to have as well as the time allocation between market and non market activities, and the education decision. The outcome of the project is two fold (1) Understand the determinants of fertility using the variation in male and female education and wages over time as well.

In the aging society, literacy skills among older adults become increasingly relevant for their economic and health outcomes, which makes it important to examine the levels and distributions of literacy skills among old population. In this pilot study, I compare the distributions of literacy skills among aged 56-65 in the U.S. and 19 other countries that participated in the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS). I focus on the crossnational variation in the literacy gap between those with high levels and those with low levels of education.

This project uses newly available data from the HLLS (Historia Laboral y Seguridad Social) survey to study the effects of the Chilean school voucher program on education and earnings outcomes, that has been in place in Chile since 1981. School voucher program are currently under consideration in the U.S. and have been tried on a small scale in some U.S. cities. The Chilean experience offers a unique opportunity to learn about the effects of school vouchers implemented on a broad scale.

Education not only impacts expected future earnings, it may also impact income risk. This pilot will examine the impact of education on income volatility. When using standard cross-sectional data sets to estimate the impact of education on earnings, it is difficult to differentiate risk from heterogeneity. This paper overcomes this problem by exploiting the panel feature of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to estimate income volatility directly for many individuals.

Many trading phenomena in financial markets cannot be explained by rational economic models and some even seem contradictory to each other, such as the disposition effect – the tendency of investors to sell winning investments too early and keep losing investments too long in their portfolio – and irrational extrapolation – the tendency of investors to invest too much into recent winners and too little into recent losers.

The structure of sexual networks is an essential determinant of individual’s HIV infection risk and the dynamics of the AIDS epidemic. While mathematical models point to a significant importance of these sexual network structures, virtually no empirical research of this issue using adequate and comprehensive social-science and biomarker data has been conducted in sub-Saharan countries.