Social Security provides retirement insurance partly through benefits tied to marital history and a spouse’s earnings. These provisions weaken the return to married women’s own work and distribute benefits according to marriage, spouse earnings, and widowhood rather than contributions alone. Because these characteristics differ sharply by race, identical benefit rules generate different work incentives and insurance value for Black and White women. I quantify these effects using a life-cycle model of singles and couples with endogenous labor supply and saving, marriage and divorce risk, heterogeneous earnings and mortality, and the full Social Security benefit schedule. Eliminating marriage-based benefits increases married women’s labor supply, with a larger response among White women and most of the distortion arising from spousal benefits. The provisions also provide valuable insurance: removing them lowers welfare unless the fiscal savings are returned. Tax reductions generate broad welfare gains, while higher own-worker benefits direct larger gains toward Black households and single women. Spousal and survivor benefits are not interchangeable. Spousal benefits create the larger labor-supply distortion and are the stronger target for reform, whereas survivor benefits provide important insurance against widowhood, particularly for women with weak earnings records.

This project studies how AI adoption affects productivity and labor markets across MENA and CCA economies. We combine country-level AI readiness with occupation-level exposure in a quantitative macroeconomic framework that separates augmentation from displacement. The analysis shows how AI affects wages and employment differently across countries and across skill, age, and gender groups. 

This paper examines the geography of U.S. venture capital during its formative decades of the 1960s and early 1970s. Drawing on newly assembled data on Small Business Investment Companies (SBICs), VC firms, PhD production, and industrial R&D laboratories, we show that specialized risk capital emerged where innovation-supporting institutions and educated populations were already concentrated. State-level analyses find that population, urbanization, and federal R&D spending predict SBIC presence. At the metropolitan level, wartime OSRD-funded patents and PhD production predict both whether and how extensively venture capital took root. These historical findings underscore that policies expanding venture capital supply without the prerequisite human capital infrastructure face fundamental limitations.