Essays on applied economics

The first chapter uses a dynamic programming model and restricted data from Health and Retirement Survey to analyze the joint determination of labor supply, consumption and the decision to apply for Social Security (SS) benefits of single males beyond normal retirement age in the U.S., currently 66. Undertaking a counterfactual analysis, I find that the year 2000 SS amendment abolishing the "earnings test" for the age group 66 - 69 explains one-fourth of the recent increase in the elderly labor force participation rate (LFPR). I further find via counterfactual analyses that the labor supply decision is sensitive to changes in SS benefit and payroll tax amounts on the extensive margin, but the effects on the intensive margin are not substantial. I also estimate labor supply elasticities for the elderly and find that the elasticities are around unit elasticity. The second chapter augments the Additively Non-ignorable (AN) model of Hirano et. al. (2001) so that it is suitable for data collection efforts that have a short panel component. Our modification yields a convenient semi-parametric bias correction framework for handling selective non-response that can emerge when multiple visits to the same unit are planned. In such surveys, selective non-response can be due to attrition, when initial response followed by nonresponse (the commonly studied case), as well as a phenomenon we term "reverse attrition", when initial nonresponse is followed by response. We apply our methodology to data from the Household Labor Force Survey (HLFS) in Turkey, which shares a key design feature (namely a rotating sample frame) of popular surveys. Our empirical results show that attrition/reverse attrition in HLFS is a statistically and substantially important concern.