We evaluate the impact of California Assembly Bill 394, which mandated maximum levels of patients per nurse in the hospital setting. When the law was passed, some hospitals already met the requirements, while others did not. Thus changes in staffing ratios from the pre- to post-mandate periods...

Provider competition is a currently popular healthcare reform model. A necessary condition for greater competition to improve quality is that providers will face higher demand if they improve their quality. We test this crucial assumption in an important part of the health care market using data...

This chapter reviews the literature devoted to studying markets for health care services and health insurance. There has been tremendous growth and progress in this field. A tremendous amount of new research has been done since the publication of the first volume of this Handbook. In addition,...

The impacts of choice in public services are controversial. We exploit a reform in the English National Health Service to assess the impact of relaxing constraints on patient choice. We estimate a demand model to evaluate whether increased choice increased demand elasticity faced by hospitals...

We compare the effects of economic incentives with a “nudge” (a policy intervention that aims to influence behaviour through changing the “choice architecture”) in relation to improving dietary choices. We study a large-scale, nationally-implemented policy – the UK Healthy Start Scheme...

Crime has been argued to have important externalities. We investigate the relationship between violent crime and an important type of behaviour: individuals’ participation in their local area through walking and physical activity. We use a sample of nearly 1 million people residing in over 320...

Interventions that improve childhood health directly improve the quality of life and, in addition, have multiplier effects, producing sustained population and economic gains in poor countries. We suggest how contemporary global institutions shaping the development, pricing and distribution of...

We exploit the introduction of sulfa drugs in 1937 to identify the causal impact of exposure to pneumonia in infancy on later life well-being and productivity in the United States. Using census data from 1980-2000, we find that cohorts born after the introduction of sulfa experienced increases...

We compare the effects of economic incentives with a “nudge” (a policy intervention that aims to influence behaviour through changing the “choice architecture”) in relation to improving dietary choices. We study a large-scale, nationally-implemented policy – the UK Healthy Start Scheme...

This paper presents the first estimates of the causal effect of facilities for prenatal sex diagnosis on the sex ratio at birth in India. It conducts a triple difference analysis across cohort, birth order and sex of previous births. Treated births are those that occur after prenatal sex...