In 2007, China launched a subsidized voluntary public health insurance program, the Urban Resident Basic Medical Insurance (URBMI), for urban residents without formal employment. We estimate the impact of the URBMI on health care utilization and expenditure by a fixed effects approach with...

We provide an analysis of the effect of physician payment methods on their hospital patients’ length of stay and risk of readmission. To do so, we exploit a major reform implemented in Quebec (Canada) in 1999. The Quebec Government introduced an optional mixed compensation (MC) scheme for...

This paper shows that long-term sick employees are unlikely to be very responsive to moderate monetary labor supply incentives. The paper, theoretically and empirically, evaluates the labor supply effects of cuts in statutory sick pay levels on long-term absenteeism in Germany. Cutting sick pay...

This paper analyzes the impact of diabetes awareness on labor income using data from a natural experiment in China. We find that diabetes in general leads to a 16.3% decrease in annual income after people being diagnosed, and the adverse impact is heterogeneous across different populations.

A key question in the ongoing policy debate over cannabis’ legal status is whether liberalizing cannabis laws leads to an increase in cannabis use. This paper provides new evidence on the impact of a specific type of liberalization, decriminalization, on initiation into cannabis use. Our...

We examine long-term neighborhood effects on low-income families using data from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) randomized housing-mobility experiment, which offered some public-housing families but not others the chance to move to less-disadvantaged neighborhoods. We show that 10-15 years...

This paper discusses some problems in determining the optimal use of road safety measures. The first of these problems is how best to define the baseline option, i.e. what will happen if no new safety measures are introduced. The second problem concerns choice of a method for selection of...

There is an increasing shortage of human organ transplants in Germany. This paper aims at understanding the reasons for that shortage and discusses various ways to alleviate it by changing the rules of donation and procurement. In particular we consider creating adequate incentives for hospitals...

This paper examines the short-run impacts of a change in residential neighborhood on the well-being of low-income families, using evidence from the Moving To Opportunity (MTO) program in which eligibility for a housing voucher was determined by random lottery. Applicants in high poverty public...

The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) demonstration assigned housing vouchers via random lottery to public housing residents in five cities. We use the exogenous variation in residential locations generated by MTO to estimate neighborhood effects on youth crime and delinquency. The offer to relocate...