Volume 30, Number 5 1995
Bound, John, Michael Schoenbaum, and Timothy Waidmann. 1995. "Race and Education Differences in Disability Status and Labor Force Attachment in the Health and Retirement Study." Journal of Human Resources 30(5):S227-S267.
The labor force participation rates of older, working-aged black men and men with lower levels of education have historically been significantly lower than those of white men and men with more education, respectively. This paper uses data from the alpha release of the new Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to examine the extent to which variation in health and job characteristics can account for these differences. Our analysis suggests that race and education differences in the health status of middle-aged men can explain a substantial fraction of black/white differences in labor force attachment and essentially all of the gap between men with different levels of education.
John Bound is an associate professor of economics and associate research scientist at the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan and is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economics Research; Michael Schoenbaum is a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy at the School of Public Health, University of California at Berkley; Timothy Waidmann is an assistant professor at the School of Public health, and NIA Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Population Studies Center and the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan. Order of Authorship is alphabetical and has no implication regarding the relative contributions of the three authors. This research was supported in part by a grant funded by the National Institute on Aging, with supplementary funding provided by the Social Security Administration and the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at the Department of Health and Human Services. The authors have benefited from comments by Charlie Brown, Rachel Connelly, Kalman Rupp, and two anonymous referees. Gema Ricart-Moes and Xiaozheng Zhao provided able research assistance. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1994 Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America.
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