This paper examines whether informal care by family members influences the demand for long-term care insurance. Motivated by evidence that the availability of informal caregivers correlates with lower insurance demand and that informal care substitutes for formal care, I estimate a dynamic model of long-term care decisions between an elderly parent and her adult child. The availability of informal care lowers demand for insurance by 7 percentage points and suppresses Medicaid spending. A policy that provides equivalent cash benefits for informal care for such families can generate meaningful increases in insurance demand and family welfare and decreases in Medicaid spending.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) affects one in ten people aged 65 or older and is the most expensive disease in the United States. We describe the central economic questions raised by AD. Although there is overlap with the economics of aging and health, the defining feature of the "economics of Alzheimer's disease" is an emphasis on choice by cognitively impaired patients that affects health and financial well-being, and situations in which dynamic contracts between patients and caregivers are useful but difficult to enforce. A focus on innovation in AD prevention, treatment, and care is also critical given the enormous social cost of AD and present lack of understanding of its causes, which raises questions of optimal resource allocation and alignment of private and social incentives. The enormous scope for economists to contribute to our understanding of AD-related issues including drug development, efficient care delivery, dynamic contracting, long-term care risk, financial decision-making, and the design of public programs for AD suggests a rich research program for many areas of economics.

This paper studies the labor market impacts of firm accommodation decisions after workplace disability and assesses implications for the design of firm subsidies. We leverage a workers' compensation (WC) program in Oregon that provides wage subsidies to firms for accommodating workers with workplace disabilities. Leveraging rich administrative data and a policy change to the wage subsidy, we show that accommodation rates respond to the subsidy rate and that receipt of accommodation leads to a significant increase in employment and earnings a year later. To explore welfare implications, we develop and estimate a frictional labor market model of accommodation as a form of human capital investment. Worker turnover and imperfect experience rating in WC lead to underaccommodation and inefficient labor market outcomes after workplace disability. Counterfactual simulations show that subsidizing accommodation not only improves long‐run labor market outcomes of workers experiencing work‐related disability but also yields welfare gains for most workers.

We document that an experimental intervention offering transport subsidies for poor rural households to migrate seasonally in Bangladesh improved risk sharing. A theoretical model of endogenous migration and risk sharing shows that the effect of subsidizing migration depends on the underlying economic environment. If migration is risky, a temporary subsidy can induce an improvement in risk sharing and enable profitable migration. We estimate the model and find that the migration experiment increased welfare by 12.9%. Counterfactual analysis suggests that a permanent, rather than temporary, decline in migration costs in the same environment would result in a reduction in risk sharing.