Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) awards rise in recessions, especially for workers over age 50. We use Medicare data to investigate how health, entry costs, and age-based DI eligibility rules shape this pattern. Entrants induced by recessions have lower medical spending and mortality than typical recipients. Entry responses to unemployment jump two- to fourfold at ages 50 and 55, when eligibility rules relax. Using these age-based discontinuities as instruments, we find no shift in marginal entrants' health across unemployment levels. These findings show that DI's age-based eligibility rules are a primary driver of cyclical entry, while health shocks are not.

We study how air pollution impacts the U.S. labor market by analyzing the effects of drifting wildfire smoke. We link satellite-based smoke plume data with labor market outcomes to estimate that an additional day of smoke exposure reduces quarterly earnings by about 0.1%. Extensive margin responses, including employment reductions and labor force exits, explain 13% of the overall earnings losses. The implied welfare costs from lost earnings due to air pollution exposure is on par with standard valuations of the mortality burden. The findings highlight the importance of labor market channels in air pollution policy responses.

We estimate the causal effects of acute fine particulate matter exposure on mortality, health care use, and medical costs among the US elderly using Medicare data. We instrument for air pollution using changes in local wind direction and develop a new approach that uses machine learning to estimate the life-years lost due to pollution exposure. Finally, we characterize treatment effect heterogeneity using both life expectancy and generic machine learning inference. Both approaches find that mortality effects are concentrated in about 25 percent of the elderly population.