I. The wage equations, 332. — II. The steady state Phillips curve, 335, — III. The threshold price variable, 336. — IV. Conclusions, 338.

A structural econometric model of retirement of dual-career couples is specified and estimated with panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Mature Women. A coincidence of spouses retiring together, despite the younger ages of wives, suggests explicit efforts at coordination. The estimates suggest that one reason is a correlation of tastes for leisure. More important, each spouse, and perhaps husbands in particular, values retirement more once their spouse has retired. The opportunity set accounts for peaks in the retirement hazards of each spouse individually, but not for peaks in the simultaneous retirement of both spouses. Copyright 2000 by University of Chicago Press.

This article formulates a general equilibrium model for analyzing the youth labor market. At the heart of the model is an interplay between a labor force with heterogeneous ability levels and a minimum wage restriction. Ability affects performance on skilled jobs and, to a lesser extent, on unskilled jobs. Workers are less productive as youths than as adults. The model is applied to rationalize several results from available studies and to analyze the effects of three representative policies: a youth subminimum wage, subsidies paid to firms that hire youths, and subsidies that offset the costs of on-the-job training.

A structural life-cycle retirement model with an improved specification over previous models is used to analyze and compare the long-run effects on the labor supply of older workers of the 1983 Social Security reforms. The effects of separate provisions from the 1983 amendments are examined. These include the raising of the normal retirement age to 67, the increase in the delayed retirement credit to 8%, and the lowering of the reduction rate for earnings over the test amount to $1.00 for every $3.00 of earnings.

The model analyzed here constrains most work on the main job to be full time. Partial retirement requires a job change and a wage reduction.Estimates of utility function parameters and their distributions incorporate information on age of leaving the main job and of full retirement. These estimates determine the slope at different ages and the convexity of within period indifference curves between compensation and leisure. Even though age specific dummy variables are not used, the model closely tracks retirement behavior. Policy analysis based on earlier models with simpler structures is shown to be misleading.

Alan L. Gustman, Thomas L. Steinmeier, A Disaggregated, Structural Analysis of Retirement by Race, Difficulty of Work and Health, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 68, No. 3 (Aug., 1986), pp. 509-513

Various aspects of the school enrollment-labor supply decision have been examined in earlier studies, including those of Bowen and Finegan (1969), Cohen, Rea, and Lerman (1970), Duncan (1965), Katz (1973), Korbel (1966) and Lerman (1972). Although these authors were aware of the joint nature of the school-work decision, typically, they used an ordinary least squares (OLS) framework with dichotomous dependent variables to analyze enrollment conditional on the labor supply decision or labor supply conditional on enrollment. Several more recent studies, such as Antos and Mellow (1978), Stephenson (1978), and Ehrenberg and Marcus (forthcoming) use multinomial logit to analyze the joint determination of labor supply and enrollment. Mallar (1976) uses a bivariate probit model to deal with the simultaneous relation between school and work. But none of these studies considers both the wage offers and job availability. There is still available no single set of estimates which considers the roles of both job availability and the wage on the joint enrollment-labor supply decision. Consider what the interrelation between wages and job availability implies for estimation of the labor force participation-school enrollment decision. To the extent that downwardly rigid wages prevent the youth labor market from clearing, one would expect both wages and job availability to influence labor supply. If one of these measures is not included in explaining labor supply, the coefficient estimated for the other measure may, for reasons well known, be biased. For example, if the wage is omitted but the unemployment variable included, and if wages and unemployment are negatively correlated, then the magnitude of the coefficient of the unemployment variable will be increased. It is also unclear on a priori grounds how job availability affects school enrollment. On the one hand, if jobs are readily available to young people, youth from poor families may be able to enroll in school, supporting themselves through part-time work. With no jobs available, some may be unable to afford school expenditures and may drop out (Bowen and Finegan, 1969, p. 404). On the other hand, readily available employment opportunities for youth may simply raise the probability of dropping out of school and working full-time. Our findings will help to determine how young people react to this influence and to other influences of the market. From the viewpoint of public policy, there are a number of reasons why it is important that the enrollment-labor supply decisions be understood, and that the separate responses to wage and job availability be isolated. For one thing, there is a tendency to discount the welfare importance of unemployment or poor labor participation for young people enrolled in school (Feldstein and Ellwood, 1979). However, the joint nature of the enrollment-labor supply decisions suggests that a high enrollment rate may not be simply a cause of low participation rates, but may be an additional symptom of adverse labor market conditions. Indeed, our results for nonwhite males support an interpretation of this kind. Second, the joint nature of the decisions also implies that public programs such as the Received for publication January 31, 1980. Revision accepted for publication December 11, 1980. * Both authors are with Dartmouth College and the National Bureau of Economic Research. The research reported here was supported by the Division of Technical Systems in the Office of Technical and Analytic Systems, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Budget, U.S. Department of Education and is part of the NBER's research program in Labor Studies. Any opinions expressed are those of the authors and not those of the National Bureau of Economic Research or of the Department of Education. We would like to thank Gary Fields, Meir Kohn, Robert Plotnick, Martin Segal and participants in the labor seminars at Harvard and at Cornell for their helpful comments.

There is evidence of a relation between numeracy and wealth held outside of pensions and Social Security. With pensions and Social Security accounting for half of wealth at retirement, and evidence that those with pensions save more in other forms, one would expect to find knowledge of pensions and Social Security influencing retirement saving. Yet we find no evidence that knowledge of pensions and Social Security is related to nonpension, non-Social Security wealth, to numeracy, or that it plays an intermediate role in the numeracy-wealth relation. Our findings raise questions about policies that would enhance numeracy to increase retirement saving.