Directed Search Over the Life Cycle

Job Search Behavior over the Business Cycle

We create a novel measure of job search effort starting in 1994 by exploiting the overlap between the Current Population Survey and the American Time Use Survey. We examine the cyclical behavior of aggregate job search effort using time series and cross-state variation and find that it is countercyclical. About half of the countercyclical movement is explained by a cyclical shift in the observa...

Political Participation over the Life Cycle

Household debt over the life cycle

Using data from the 2001 Survey of Consumer Finances, this study examines how the holding of types and amounts of household debt changes over the life cycle. The results show that the likelihood of holding each type of debt and the amount of each type of debt compared to total assets decrease with age. Although the popular press has speculated that older households accumulate excessive amounts ...

Health Inequality over the Life-Cycle

Health Inequality over the Life-Cycle We investigate the evolution of health inequality over the life-course. Health is modeled as a latent variable that is determined by three factors: endowments, and permanent and transitory shocks. We employ Simulated Minimum Distance and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to estimate the model. We estimate that permanent shocks account for under 10% of the ...

Stocks and Bonds over the Life Cycle