Education
During the steel and coal busts of the 1980s, applications for federal disability benefits rose in areas where these industries had laid off workers. Now there’s a 21st century reason to apply: student loans. College debt is extremely difficult to discharge in the bankruptcy courts. But the U.S. Department of Education in 2013 opened a…
Abstract Many people engage in self-employment, yet there exists a dearth of data on these arrangements. This paper addresses this gap by creating a novel dataset of self-employment roles to examine heterogeneity in self-employment arrangements. The approach uses non-public 2016 Health and Retirement Study (HRS) data on employer names and locations and narrative descriptions of…
