The Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) policy evaluates applicants’ health as a binary outcome and creates incentives to exaggerate or even exacerbate one’s health problems to acquire eligibility. Using Health and Retirement Study data and the Method of Simulated Moments, I estimate an individual decision-making model that allows the evaluation of the labor and health effects of changes in the SSDI design. Specifically, I focus on a modification that allows disability benefits for the partially disabled Americans aged between 51 and Social Security’s full retirement age. According to simulations, this reform will increase the labor supply of this age group by ∼6 p.p. and decrease their mortality rate by up to 0.1 p.p. Back-of-the-envelope calculations show that, thanks to the reform, labor supply increases by ~3 million person-years, and ≥40,000 Americans will have longer lives. After accounting for increased taxes, the investment required to prolong one person’s life by one year is ∼$17,000.

Do the benefits of school closure outweigh the costs? This paper analyzes the tradeoff of the consequences of school closure during the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyze the effect of school closure on children’s health, parents’ health, and parental labor supply. The study uses the Russian household survey linked with the grade-specific daily dataset on regional school closures. We leverage the published dates of survey interviews to exploit within-round variation in schooling disruptions. Specifically, we aggregate daily data on schooling policies to match the timeframe of survey questions. Employing fixed effects models across a 5-year (2017-2021) panel, we find that school closures significantly decrease the probability of children experiencing flu-like symptoms and having other health issues. Parents indirectly benefit from school closure via reduced contagion. On the other hand, school closures significantly disrupted parental labor supply.

This study reveals substantial heterogeneity in how mothers and fathers responded to COVID-19-related school closures in Russia. Employing the correlated random coefficient model with individual fixed effects across a 6-year panel, we find that, on average, school closures did not impact working hours but resulted in decreased employment and increased remote work, with the effect on mothers being notably more pronounced than on fathers. However, the variation in treatment effects is striking across parental, children’s, and household characteristics, and regional conditions. In several subsamples, the employment response of fathers closely mirrors that of mothers, especially among older parents, those with younger pre-school children, and in regions with low unemployment rates. When interacting with two or more different factors, the study unveils a complex within-family production function determining the differential responses of parents under diverse regional, temporal and family circumstances.

Did COVID-19 school closures merely reduce learning, or did they redirect students’ educational pathways? This paper studies this question in Russia, where school closures varied sharply across regions and grades and students choose educational tracks relatively early. We combine the 2017–2024 Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey with a new daily dataset of grade-specific regional school closures. Stacked difference-in-differences estimates show that closures reduced academic performance and disrupted structured educational inputs, including extended school programs and extracurricular enrichment. Households responded through informal childcare and higher private education spending, but these adjustments were partial and concentrated among more advantaged families. Using cohort-specific cumulative exposure to instructional closure days, we show that exposure shifted students away from general secondary education and toward specialized college tracks, with smaller increases in non-enrollment, especially among students without universityeducated parents. The results suggest that school closures affected not only instructional time but also students’ progression through the education system, contributing to divergence in educational trajectories by parental education.

This paper examines the intergenerational effects of Social Security benefits on young people’s economic outcomes. I exploit quasi-experimental variation from the U.S. Social Security “Notch”—a policy that sharply reduced benefits for cohorts born after 1916—to identify the causal impact of retirement income received by older family members on their children’s and grandchildren’s outcomes. Using the Current Population Survey and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I link exposure to the Notch with educational attainment and earnings of subsequent generations. I find that larger retirement benefits increase young people’s schooling and earnings, with the strongest effects among lower-income families. These findings demonstrate that Social Security not only insures retirees against income loss but also generates positive intergenerational spillovers, enhancing economic mobility across generations.

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly altered the economic landscape, presenting new challenges and considerations for saving for old age. This paper examines the impact of the pandemic on retirement savings patterns and financial behaviors, drawing on data from multiple countries. Specifically, we use the Global Findex database. Our findings reveal that the pandemic has generated pervasive shifts in saving behavior. The study explores how COVID-19 affected old age savings through various channels, including lockdowns and other pandemic-related measures, behavioral changes, shifts in beliefs, and alterations in perceived and actual longevity.

This paper examines how Social Security influences wealth accumulation and asset ownership across racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Exploiting variation from the Social Security Notch and applying an instrumental variables regression framework, I estimate the causal impact of Social Security on wealth using the Health and Retirement Study. The findings underscore the dual role of Social Security. While higher Social Security reinforces existing disparities in aggregate wealth, it also helps narrow inequalities in access to key assets, thereby improving retirement security for disadvantaged groups.