Nicole Maestas is an Economist at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, CA, and Associate Director of Economics, Finance, and Organization, RAND Health. Dr. Maestas received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley, her M.P.P. from the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, and her B.A. from Wellesley College. Her research interests include applied microeconomics, the economics of aging, and health economics. She has studied the effect of medical expenditure risk on portfolio choices, price variation in the Medigap insurance market, and the effect of the Medicare program on disparities in health care utilization, treatment intensity, and mortality. In research on retirement, she has studied the retirement behavior of married couples, “unretirement” by older workers, job search and attainment by older workers, and the effect of differential retirement incentives on the retirement behavior of wage and salary versus self-employed workers in the U.S. and U.K. She is a Professor of Economics at the Pardee RAND Graduate School of Public Policy, where she teaches a course in Microeconomic Theory.
Publications
Back to Work: Expectations and Realizations of Work after Retirement, Journal of Human Resources (2010)
This forthcoming paper analyzes a puzzling aspect of retirement behavior known as "unretirement." Nearly 50...
How Longer Work Lives Ease the Crunch of Population Aging (with Julie M. Zissimopoulos), Journal of Economic Perspectives (2010)
Formerly Work at Older Ages: The Shape of Change
Does Medicare Save Lives? (with David Card and Carlos Dobkin), Quarterly Journal of Economics (2009)
Health insurance characteristics shift at age 65 as most people become eligible for Medicare. We...
The Impact of Nearly Universal Insurance Coverage on Health Care Utilization and Health: Evidence from Medicare (with David Card and Carlos Dobkin), American Economic Review (2008)
Cohort Differences in Retirement Expectations and Realizations, Redefining Retirement: How Will Boomers Fare? (2007)
Working Papers
Price Variation in Markets with Homogeneous Goods: The Case of Medigap (with Mathis Schroeder and Dana P. Goldman), Price Variation in Markets with Homogeneous Goods: The Case of Medigap (2009)
About one-third of elderly Americans age 65 and older supplements their Medicare health insurance in...
Peer Groups and Employment Outcomes: Evidence Based on Conditional Random Assignment in the U.S. Army (with Seo Yeon Hong and Pinar Karaca-Mandic), Pinar Karaca-Mandic (2008)
Burnout and the Retirement Decision (with Xiaoyan Li), University of Michigan Retirement Research Center, Working Paper (2007)
Discouraged Workers? Job Search Outcomes of Older Workers (with Xiaoyan Li), University of Michigan Retirement Research Center, Working Paper (2006)
Many have suggested we adopt policies that explicitly encourage the elderly to work. Behind this...