This article uses a unique data set to measure the economic and demographic consequences of mental illness. We find that mental illness significantly reduces an individual's earnings and that in some cases this effect lasts as long as 15 years. Mental illness is also shown to affect an individual's ability to marry or stay married, lowers the number of children that he has, and encourages his wife to work.

"Birth-order effects are posited by many to affect earnings and schooling. We show how such effects can be interpreted to shift either the earnings possibility frontier for siblings or parental preferences. We find empirical evidence for birth-order effects on (age-adjusted) schooling and on earnings for young U.S. adults, though the latter is not robust for all specifications. The examination of intrahousehold allocations suggests that these birth-order differences occur despite parental preferences or prices by birth order favoring later borns, apparently because of stronger endowment effects that favor first borns."

in this paper we specify and estimate a structural limited dependent variable model with which we study both the health and retirement status of the elderly.Standard linear estimators, which assume that these variables are continuous, are not appropriate and categorical estimation techniques are preferred.Our model differs from previous work in that we have longitudinal data and random effects that are correlated over time for different individuals.The problem is made more complicated because there is sample truncation, which could potentially bias coefficient estimates, since approximately twenty percent of the individuals in our sample die.We outline the full information maximum likelihood estimator for such a model and implement it in our empirical analysis.With our structural estimates we analyze, among other things, the degree to which endogeneously determined health status affects the probability of retirement and how changes in social security benefits and eligibility for transfer payments modify both healthiness and the demand for leisure.