Nicole Maestas is Acting Director of the Bing Center for Health Economics, Director of the Center for Disability Research, Manager of the Economics and Statistics Research Group, and a Senior Economist at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, CA. 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 span health economics, retirement economics, and disability economics. Recent work, primarily funded by NIH and the Social Security Administration, has included studies of the effect of the Medicare program on disparities in health care utilization, treatment intensity, and mortality; work at older ages and its potential to ameliorate the economic effects of population aging; and the work disincentive effects of the Social Security Disability Insurance program. She is Director of the RAND Post-Doctoral Training Program in the Study of Aging and is a Professor of Economics at the Pardee RAND Graduate School of Public Policy, where she teaches a core course in Microeconomic Theory.
Publications
Medical Expenditure Risk and Household Portfolio Choice (with Dana P. Goldman), Forthcoming, Journal of Applied Econometrics (2012)
Household Portfolio Choices, Health Status and Health Care Systems: A Cross-Country Analysis Based on SHARE (with Vincenzo Atella and Brunetti Marianna), Forthcoming, Journal of Banking and Finance (2012)
Health risk is increasingly viewed as an important form of background risk that affects household...
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]
Population aging is not a looming...
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...
Cohort Differences in Retirement Expectations and Realizations, Redefining Retirement: How Will Boomers Fare? (2007)
Working Papers
Using Examiner Assignment to Estimate Causal Effects of SSDI Receipt (with Kathleen J. Mullen and Alexander Strand), Revise and Resubmit, American Economic Review (2011)
We present the first estimates of the causal effect of SSDI receipt on the labor...
Price Variation in Markets with Homogeneous Goods: The Case of Medigap (with Mathis Schroeder and Dana P. Goldman), Revise and Resubmit, Review of Economics and Statistics (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...