Medical care at the end of life, estimated to contribute up to a quarter of US health care spending, often encounters skepticism from payers and policy makers who question its high cost and often minimal health benefits. However, though many observers have claimed that such spending is often...

We study how the health and health insurance coverage of Mexican immigrants change with time in the US. Cross-sectional analyses suggest that approximately three decades of residency in the US is associated with a 9 to 11 percentage point (12% to 15%) decline in the probability of being...

We implemented five strategies gleaned from practices in achievement-increasing charter schools - increased instructional time, a more rigorous approach to building human capital of teachers and administrators, high-dosage tutoring, frequent use of data to inform instruction, and a culture of...

Atkinson, Piketty, and Saez (2011) survey an important new literature using income tax-based data to measure the share of income held by top income groups. But changes in tax legislation that expand the tax base to include income sources (e.g. capital gains, dividends, etc.) disproportionately...

In any nonlinear “difference-in-differences” model with strictly monotonic transformation function, the treatment effect is the cross difference of the observed outcome minus the cross difference of the potential non-treatment outcome, which equals the incremental effect of the interaction...

A utilitarian social planner who maximizes social welfare assigns the available income to those who are most efficient in converting income into utility. However, when individuals are concerned about their income falling behind the incomes of others, the optimal income distribution under...

The school finance reforms (SFRs) that began in the early 1970s and accelerated in the 1980s caused some of the most dramatic changes in the structure of K-12 education spending in U.S. history. We analyze the effects of these reforms on the level and distribution of school district spending, as...

The federal government spends billions of dollars each year on programs designed to increase the resources available to hospitals that serve the poor. This paper explores the intended and unintended effects of such targeted funds. First, how do these funds distort the behavior of state and local...

This paper provides an introduction and "user guide" to Regression Discontinuity (RD) designs for empirical researchers. It presents the basic theory behind the research design, details when RD is likely to be valid or invalid given economic incentives, explains why it is considered a...

What impact does inequality have on metropolitan areas? Crime rates are higher in places with more inequality, and people in unequal cities are more likely to say that they are unhappy. There is also a negative association between local inequality and the growth of both income and population,...