During the Great Recession, more older workers have claimed Social Security benefits early. This paper addresses two important policy questions: Who are these early claimers? How much retirement income have they lost as a result of claiming early? Using the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) we estimate a discrete-time hazard model that makes claiming Social Security benefits a function of age, personal characteristics, and the national unemployment rate.

The family is an important setting within which the Great Recession can exert its influence. Although the downturn directly affected many workers by reducing their earnings or forcing them into unemployment, it affected others indirectly by changing their living arrangements or family life. Further, the ways in which families are formed or broken up may be affected by the Great Recession, as it can alter the perceived costs and benefits of various family-relevant behaviors.

Robert Frank's PowerPoint presentation to accompany his talk at the Executive Compensation event sponsored by the Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality and hosted at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, DC on May 4, 2010. See also the PowerPoint audio file of this talk.

Common sense tells us that crime should increase during hard times. After all, more than 90 percent of the serious "index" crimes reported each year in the government's Uniform Crime Reports involve some kind of financial remuneration. And we've all seen examples of people taking desperate actions when they are cold, broke, and hungry, whether through real-life, firsthand observations or through fictional characters like Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath. Yet there is much evidence that crime rates and economic indicators often diverge.