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There is widespread and longstanding agreement that life expectancy and income are positively correlated. However, it has proven much more difficult to establish a causal relationship since income and health are jointly determined. We use a major change in the Social Security law as exogenous variation in income to examine the impact of income on mortality in an elderly population. The legislation created a notch' in Social Security benefits based upon date of birth; those born before January 1, 1917 generally receive higher benefits than those born afterwards. We compare mortality rates after age 65 for males born in the second half of 1916 and the first half of 1917. Data from restricted-use versions of the National Mortality Detail File combined with Census data allows us to count all deaths among elderly Americans between 1979 and 1993. We find that the higher income group has a statistically significantly higher mortality rate, contradicting the previous literature. We also find that the younger cohort responded to lower incomes by increasing post-retirement work effort. These results suggest that moderate employment has beneficial health effects for the elderly.
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School officials and policy makers have grown increasingly concerned about their ability to attract and retain talented teachers. A number of authors have shown that in recent years the brightest students at least those with the highest verbal and math scores on standardized tests are less likely to enter teaching. In addition, it is frequently claimed that the ability of schools to attract these top students has been steadily declining for years. There is, however, surprisingly little evidence measuring the extent to which this popular proposition is true. We have good reason to suspect that the quality of those entering teaching has fallen over time. Teaching has remained a predominately female profession for years; at the same time, the employment opportunities for talented women outside of teaching have soared. In this paper, we combine data from four longitudinal surveys of high school graduates spanning the years 1957-1992 to examine how the propensity for talented women to enter teaching has changed over time. We find that while the quality of the average new female teacher has fallen only slightly over this period, the likelihood that a female from the top of her high school class will eventually enter teaching has fallen dramatically from 1964 to 1992 by our estimation, from almost 20% to under 4%.
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In the late 1980s, a series of legal rulings favorable to tribes and the subsequent passage of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 legalized gaming operations on reservations in many states. Today, there are over 310 gaming operations run by more than 200 of the nations' 556 federally-recognized tribes. Of these operations, about 220 are Las Vegas' style casinos with slot machines and/or table games. We use a simple difference-in-difference framework where we compare economic outcomes before and after tribes open casinos to outcomes over the same period for tribes that do not adopt or are prohibited from adopting gaming. Four years after tribes open casinos, employment has increased by 26 percent, and tribal population has increased by about 12 percent, resulting in an increase in employment to population ratios of five percentage points or about 12 percent. The fraction of adults who work but are poor has declined by 14 percent. Tribal gaming operations seem to have both positive and negative spillovers in the surrounding communities. In counties where an Indian-owned casino opens, we find that jobs per adult increase by about five percent of the median value. Given the size of tribes relative to their counties, most of this growth in employment is due to growth in non-Native American employment. The increase in economic activity appears to have some health benefits in that four or more years after a casino opens, mortality has fallen by 2 percent in a county with a casino and an amount half that in counties near a casino. Casinos do, however, come at some cost. Four years after a casino opens, bankruptcy rates, violent crime, and auto thefts and larceny are up 10 percent in counties with a casino.
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