AN NBER PUBLICATION
ISSUE: No. 2, February 2000
The Digest
A free monthly publication featuring non-technical summaries of research on topics of broad public interest
Increases in the Earned Income Tax Credit account for about 63 percent of the increase in employment of single mothers between 1984 and 1996.
When government policies make it pay for poor, single mothers to go to work, more of them do so. Between 1984 and 1996, policies governing welfare, Medicaid, and taxes were changed dramatically to increase the financial incentives for single mothers to get jobs. The changes worked. Single mothers, particularly those...
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Postwar Americans lose 5 cents out of every dollar they have earned or will earn over their lifetimes in the form of payroll taxes paid into OASI in excess of benefits received.
Social Security gives people born in the second half of the 20th century a bad deal, according to Jagadeesh Gokhale and Laurence Kotlikoff, and the $8 trillion funding shortfall facing the system in the 21st century means that things are going to get worse. In Social Security's Treatment of...
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There is no support for the view that currency movements were consistently important determinants of the performance of banks in the crisis countries.
When in 1997 economies across Asia were suddenly knocked flying from their pedestals as the prima donnas of international development, many a learned analysis was quick to finger the banking system as the locus of the problem. Most notably, several critics argued that banks suffered steep losses--and thus contributed...
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Spending on post-acute care for those over age 85 has risen 20 percent per year in the last decade, from $241 per Medicare enrollee in 1985 to $1,887 in 1995.
For the past twenty years, the number of Medicare beneficiaries has increased by 50 percent and Medicare spending per beneficiary has doubled. This growth has occurred despite the fact that the health of Medicare beneficiaries has improved. In The Concentration Of Medical Spending: An Update (NBER Working Paper...