We estimate well-being among older rural Americans with an expected utility framework and simulations using longitudinal data spanning nearly 30 years from the Health and Retirement Study. At age sixty, we find mean rural consumption expenditures of 24,105 dollars, a retirement probability of 53%, and a remaining life expectancy of 20.3 years for the cohort born 1931-36. When adjusting life expectancy for living in poor health, we obtain an age sixty quality adjusted life expectancy (QALE) of only 15.4 years. Our welfare metric suggests well-being among socially isolated rural residents is only about half that of more integrated rural residents—largely driven by substantial consumption and QALE gaps. We also document substantial regional variation in rural well-being. Moreover, we find that older rural Americans are generally falling further behind older urban Americans across birth cohorts. Most of this widening gap is driven by declining relative consumption and wealth as opposed to health.

We estimate racial and ethnic disparities in well-being among older Americans using longitudinal data and an expected utility framework that incorporates differences in consumption, leisure, health, mortality, and wealth. Our measure broadly indicates that racial and ethnic inequality is larger than suggested by other welfare metrics such as consumption or life expectancy alone. Decomposition exercises show that a majority of the estimated welfare gaps are determined by age sixty initial conditions as opposed to racial and ethnic differences in dynamic processes after age sixty. Additional counterfactuals suggest that eliminating common heath risk factors such as hypertension or diabetes in late-life only marginally closes overall welfare gaps. These simulations suggest that policies aimed at closing racial and ethnic gaps in late-life may be more successful and efficient if targeted earlier in the life-cycle.

Scientific literature has identified the impact of short-term air pollution exposure on crime in the United States (US) and in the City of London, United Kingdom (UK). Causal mechanisms explaining the association between crime and air pollution are not fully understood. Leveraging monthly fluctuations in air quality at the local authority district level from 2014-2019 across the UK, we use a panel fixed effects model that accounts for unobserved heterogeneity and spatial correlation to identify relationships between air pollution and various property and violent crimes. Overall, we find that air pollution significantly increases property crimes but not crimes of violence. Nonlinear analyses indicate that the relationship between air pollution and property crimes is strikingly dose-responsive. Also, as criminal opportunities subside in the winter period, the estimated elasticity of crime vis-a-vis air pollution attenuates intuitively. Toward an economic explanation of the relationship between air pollution and crime, we find that crime types with lower clearance rates are substantially more responsive to changes in air pollution, a result that is compatible with a rational choice model of crime.

We investigate compensating differentials in the U.S. labor market related to the degree of moral compromise required in different occupations. Specifically, we explore whether jobs that require workers to compromise their moral values offer higher compensation to compensate for the disamenities that contradict their moral beliefs. Our findings, obtained through the use of two-ways fixed-effects and first-difference models, indicate that jobs that require workers to compromise their moral principles are associated with higher compensation.

We quantify the welfare cost of depression among older Americans by estimating a panel VAR model of mental and physical health, labor supply, and consumption using data from the Health and Retirement Study. We use the estimated model and age sixty joint distribution of outcomes to simulate life-cycle paths with and without prevalence of depressive symptoms after age sixty. We estimate that the prevalence of late-life depressive symptoms costs an average of between 0.85 and 2.1 years in quality-adjusted life expectancy per person. Moreover, depression may result in an average loss of labor supply of up to 1.1 months and lifetime consumption of up to 16,000 US dollars. Combining into a single compensating variation welfare metric, we estimate a bound on the average welfare cost of depression of 8–15 percent of annual consumption after age sixty. On aggregate, this amounts to roughly 180–360 billion US dollars annually. We also project that while the average welfare cost of late-life depression is declining slightly over birth cohorts, the welfare burden is becoming significantly more unequal.