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Archived as of September 23, 2005

CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS

William Gale is a Senior Fellow and holds the Arjay and Frances Miller Chair in Federal Economic Policy in the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution. His areas of expertise include tax policy, budget and fiscal policy, public and private saving behavior and pensions, and intergenerational transfers of wealth. Gale is co-editor of Rethinking Estate and Gift Taxation, Economic Effects of Fundamental Tax Reform, and the Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs, all published by Brookings. Gale is author or co-author of numerous academic articles including: "Perspectives on the Budget Surplus," National Tax Journal (2000), "The Adequacy of Retirement Saving," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (1999) and "The Effects of Pensions on Household Wealth," Journal of Political Economy (August 1998). He is a member of the editorial board of the National Tax Journal.

Marjorie Honig is Professor of Economics at Hunter College and the Graduate School of CUNY and Chair of the Economics Department at Hunter College. She is a member of the Board of Outside Scholars of the Michigan Retirement Research Center and of the Advisory Board of the Brookdale Foundation National Fellowship Program. She also serves as advisor to the International Longevity Center of the Mount Sinai Medical Center. Prior to joining the CUNY faculty in 1981, she held faculty positions at Rutgers University, the University of Illinois-Champaign, and served as Director of the Division of Basic Research of the National Insurance Institute of Israel. Her research interests have focused on issues related to the economics of aging, including individual retirement decisions, retirement expectations, the roles of Social Security and employer pensions, and the estimation of retirement wealth. Her current research focuses on job loss among older workers and take-up rates in employment-based health insurance and pensions. She received the Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia University.

Michael Hurd received a Masters Degree in Statistics and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the Director of the RAND Center for the Study of Aging. Hurd is the author of a widely cited article (J. of Economic Literature, 1990) on the economics of aging. He has research papers on the structure of private pensions and Social Security and their effects on retirement decisions, the economic status of the elderly, the determinants of consumption and saving (particularly mortality risk), forecasting the economic status of the elderly, and the determinants of the use of health care services among the elderly. His current work includes the effects of pensions on retirement, the use of subjective information, particularly survival probabilities, to explain economic decisions such as saving and retirement, methods of assessing uncertainty in a population, and the relationship between socioeconomic status and mortality

Arie Kapteyn received Masters degrees both in agricultural economics, from Wageningen University, and in econometrics, from Erasmus University, Rotterdam. He received a Ph.D. from Leyden University, all in The Netherlands. He has held faculty positions at Leyden University, University of Southern California, and Tilburg University. He joined RAND as a senior economist in January 2001. Arie Kapteyn's research interests include the analysis of panel data and measurement errors and the use of subjective variables in economic modeling. His current research interests include the potential and limitations of Internet interviewing, the modeling of household saving behavior, particularly for retirement (e.g. Alessie, Lusardi, Kapteyn, Labour Economics, 1999), and more generally the economics of aging. He was a member of the recent NRC panel on a Research Agenda and New Data for an Aging World.

Lynn A. Karoly received a Ph.D. in economics from Yale University in 1988. She is a RAND senior economist and Director of RAND's Labor and Population Program. Karoly's research has focused on topics in labor economics and social welfare policy. In particular, she has been investigating labor market transitions and health insurance and pension benefits for older U.S. workers in a series of studies funded by the U.S. Department of Labor through RAND's Center for the Study of Employee Health Benefits. In other recent work, Karoly has investigated the costs and benefits of early childhood intervention programs, the impact of welfare reform on child and family well-being, and the trends and causes of the widening income and wage gap in the U.S. In addition to her research, Karoly has been on the faculty of the RAND Graduate School of Policy Studies since 1989 and she is a co-editor of the Journal of Human Resources.

Mark McClellan was confirmed as a Member of the Council of Economic Advisers by President George W. Bush on July 19, 2001. Before joining the CEA, from 1999-2000, he was Associate Professor of Economics at Stanford University, Associate Professor of Medicine at Stanford Medical School, a practicing internist, and Director of the Program on Health Outcomes Research at Stanford University, and a Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is also a Member of the National Cancer Policy Board of the National Academy of Sciences, Associate Editor of the Journal of Health Economics, and co-Principal Investigator of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). Recently, he has been serving as a policy adviser for the White House on health care and other economic issues. His research studies have addressed measuring and improving the quality of health care, the economic and policy factors influencing medical treatment decisions, technological change in health care and its consequences for health and medical expenditures, uninsurance, and the relationship between health and economic well-being.

Constantijn ('Stan') Panis received a J.D. in Civil Law in 1988 and a Ph.D. in Economics in 1992. He has been with RAND's Labor and Population Program since 1992. His research focuses on health and financial security among the elderly. His recent substantive interests include the relationship between retirement income prospects and private portfolio investments in the United States, the Netherlands, and Italy; the effects of pensions and health insurance on the retirement timing decisions of married couples; the effects of raising the early and normal Social Security retirement ages on workers' retirement and disability claiming behavior; the determinants and long-term consequences of premature pension cash-outs; stochastic forecasts of disability prevalence; the effect of income annuitization on retirees' peace of mind; and the implications for Medicare costs of newly emerging innovations in medical technology and health care delivery. Methodologically, he aims to improve models of multidimensional decisions and microsimulation techniques of such models, in the presence of correlated unobserved heterogeneity.

Cordelia W. Reimers is a Professor of Economics at Hunter College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York, where she has taught since 1982. In recent years she has been a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and a Senior Economist at the Council of Economic Advisers in Washington. She received her B.S. in History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1958 and her Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia University in 1977. Prior to joining the faculty at CUNY, she was an Assistant Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Her research has focused on racial and ethnic differences in labor market outcomes and on Social Security and retirement behavior.

Jeannette A. Rogowski received a Ph.D. in Economics from M.I.T. in 1987. She is a Senior Economist at RAND and director of RAND's Center for Employer-Sponsored Health and Pension Benefits. Her research in this area focuses on gender differences in access to employer-sponsored benefits and retirement behavior. She also serves as the co-director of RAND's Center for Health Care Markets and Vulnerable Populations. Her research in this area includes studying the effects of changing health care market structure on the quality of hospital care and access to medical services for vulnerable populations. In recognition of leadership in her fields of work, Dr. Rogowski was named a Fellow of the Association for Health Services Research.

James P. Smith received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1972. He holds the RAND Chair in Labor Markets and Demographic Studies and was the Director of RAND's Labor and Population Studies Program from 1977-1994. He has led numerous projects, including studies of immigration, the economics of aging, black-white wages and employment, the effects of economic development on labor markets, wealth accumulation and savings behavior, and the interrelation of health and economic status among the elderly. He is currently Principal Investigator for The New Immigrant Survey, a cost-effective survey that yields adequate sample size of the foreign born, has known sampling properties, permits longitudinal analyses, and can answer policy questions of particular relevance to immigration. Smith has written a number of papers on the quality of asset data in both HRS and AHEAD and racial and ethnic differences in personal net worth, Social Security, and pension wealth. He has received the National Institutes of Health MERIT Award, the most distinguished honor NIH grants to a researcher.

John Karl Scholz is a professor of economics and Director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. In 1997-98 he was the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax Analysis at the U.S. Treasury Department, and from 1990-1991 he was a senior staff economist at the Council of Economic Advisors. Professor Scholz has written extensively on the earned income tax credit and low-wage labor markets. He also writes on public policy and household saving, charitable contributions, and bankruptcy laws. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Nicholas Souleles is the Gilbert and Shelly Harrison Term Assistant Professor of Finance at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. His areas of research include applied econometrics, finance, and macroeconomics; household consumption, saving, and investments. Currently he is working on projects covering household portfolio choice, consumer credit, physician income and practice behavior, housing and rental markets and the relationship to household consumption and savings to income. Mr. Souleles received his Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a B.A. from University of Oxford, and a B.S.E. from Princeton University.

Finis Welch is a Distinguished Professor of Economics and the Abell Professor of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University. He is also Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is Vice President of the American Economics Association and President-elect of the Society of Labor Economists. Welch is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the Econometrics Society. He also chairs Unicon Research and Stata Corp. He founded and directed RAND's Program in Labor and Population Studies until being succeeded by Jim Smith in 1978. His research has focused on the economics of income, employment, and education. He has studied black/white income changes over time and the roles of education, affirmative action, and business conditions on the incomes of minorities. More recently he has contributed to the literature on the growth in wage inequality, and in the value of skill in the U.S. economy.

Paul R. Zurawski was appointed to the position of Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy of the U.S. Department of Labor's Pension and Welfare Benefits Administration on June 25, 2001. Mr. Zurawski directs the policy, legislative and research functions of the agency that administers the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA). He came to the Department after three and a half years of working as legislative counsel at The Business Roundtable. A major part of his work involved developing public policy goals for issues on health, private pension law, international trade and civil justice reform. He also has solid legislative experience, spanning the period 1994 to 1998. He has worked on the legislative staff of three members of the House of Representatives on issues relating to health care, social security, education and law enforcement.

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