War and Marriage: Assortative Mating and the World War II GI Bill.

World War II and its subsequent GI Bill have been widely credited with playing a transformative role in American society, but there have been few quantitative analyses of these historical events' broad social effects. We exploit between-cohort variation in the probability of military service to investigate how WWII and the GI Bill altered the structure of marriage, and find that it had important spillover effects beyond its direct effect on men's educational attainment. Our results suggest that the additional education received by returning veterans caused them to "sort" into wives with significantly higher levels of education. This suggests an important mechanism by which socioeconomic status may be passed on to the next generation.

The Impact of Multimorbidity on Labor Force Participation among the Middle-aged and Older Working Population in the United States.

OBJECTIVE: Multimorbidity, known as multiple chronic conditions (MCCs), is the co-existence of two or more chronic health conditions (CHC). The near-retirement-age population with MCC is more likely to experience discontinued labor force participation (LFP). Our objective was to evaluate the impact of MCC on LFP among adults aged 50-64 and to explore heterogeneous effects between self-employed and non-self-employed workers. METHOD: We constructed our sample using the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) from 1996 to 2018. We adopted an individual fixed-effect (F.E.) model and Propensity Score Matching (PSM) to measure the impact of MCC on the probability of being employed and changes in annual work hours. RESULTS: 50.5% of respondents have MCC. Individuals with MCC exhibit a predicted probability of being employed that is 9.3 percentage points (P<0.01, 95% CI: -0.109, -0.078) lower than those without MCC. Compared with non-CHC, MCC significantly reduced annual working hours by 6.1% (P<0.01, 95% CI: -0.091, -0.036) in the F.E. model and by 4.9% (P<0.01, CI: -0.064, -0.033) in PSM estimation. The effect is more pronounced for the self-employed with MCC, who have 13.0% (P<0.05, CI: -0.233, -0.026) fewer annual work hours than non-CHCs based on the FE model and 13.4% (P<0.01, CI: -0.197, -0.070) in PSM estimation. DISCUSSION: MCC significantly reduces LFP compared with non-MCC. MCC has a heterogeneous impact across occupational types. It is important to support the near-retirement-age working population with multimorbidity through effective clinical interventions and workplace wellness policies to help manage health conditions and remain active in the labor market.

The Impact of Medicare Part D on Self-Employment.

We explore the relationship between access to affordable health insurance and self-employment using exogenous variation from the introduction of Medicare Part D that reduced the out-of-pocket cost of prescription drugs and improved health outcomes in a difference-in-differences model using the American Community Survey. We find that our treatment group of individuals aged 65-69 were 0.5 percentage points (or 5%) more likely to be self-employed in relation to a control group aged 60-64.