Three Essays in Labor and Public Economics.

Abstract

This study comprises three essays exploring new questions in regard to the role of health insurance in retirement decisions and the financial value of avoiding perceived crime. In ``Love, Toil, and Health Insurance: Why American Husbands Retire When They Do,'' the chapter examines the relationship of both spouses' health insurance options to the household's timing of the husband's retirement. Previous literature has largely ignored the inter-spousal dependence of health insurance benefits. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, an important finding is that a wife's health insurance options have an independent impact on the timing of her husband's exit from the labor force. This impact is similar in magnitude to that of a husband's own health insurance options. In ``The Lasting Effects of Crime: The Relationship of Methamphetamine Laboratory Discoveries and Home Values,'' the chapter presents estimates of a household's willingness to pay to avoid crime while minimizing concerns of omitted variable bias. By assuming methamphetamine producers locate approximately at random within a narrowly defined neighborhood, this study has been able to use hedonic estimation methods to estimate the impact of the discovery of that lab on the home values near that location. Though more evidence is necessary, one interpretation is that the impact on property values reflects the valuation of the perceived risk of crime. The estimates found in this study range from a decrease in sale prices of six to ten percent in the year following a laboratory's discovery compared to the prices for homes that are slightly farther away. The third essay, ``The Impact of Health Insurance Availability on Retirement Decision Reversals,'' also uses the longitudinal aspect of the Health and Retirement Study to explore the characteristics associated with reversals in retirement. Through the use of survival time analysis, this essay shows that health insurance plays a significant role in unretirement decisions. This role is underestimated when a static probit analysis is used with characteristics at the time of an individual's retirement. The results are robust to various definitions of retirement prompted by the difficult question of how to classify partial retirements.