Education not only impacts expected future earnings, it may also impact income risk. This pilot will examine the impact of education on income volatility. When using standard cross-sectional data sets to estimate the impact of education on earnings, it is difficult to differentiate risk from heterogeneity. This paper overcomes this problem by exploiting the panel feature of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to estimate income volatility directly for many individuals.

This investigation will seek explanations of the recent poor performance of mortality among older women in the United States, relative both to older men and to women in previous eras. It will investigate causes of death responsible for the slowdown in their rate of mortality advance, and will study the role of changes in risk factor distributions. Particular attention will be paid to the role of cigarette smoking histories and to obesity. An effort will be made to combine information on changes in risk factor distributions with estimates of their mortality consequences.

Many trading phenomena in financial markets cannot be explained by rational economic models and some even seem contradictory to each other, such as the disposition effect – the tendency of investors to sell winning investments too early and keep losing investments too long in their portfolio – and irrational extrapolation – the tendency of investors to invest too much into recent winners and too little into recent losers.