One of the core goals of a universal health care system is to eliminate discrimination on the basis of socioeconomic status.  We test for discrimination using patient waiting times for non-emergency treatment in public hospitals.  Waiting time should reflect patients' clinical need with...

Economists have traditionally assumed that individual behavior is motivated exclusively by extrinsic incentives.  Social physchologists, in contrast, stress that intrinsic motivations are also important.  In recent work, economic theorists have started to build psychological factors, like...

Suppliers who are better informed than purchasers, such as physicians treating insured patients, often have discretion over what to provide. This paper shows how, when the purchaser observes what is supplied but neither recipient type nor the actual cost incurred, optimal provision differs from...

The trend towards Internet self-regulation is driven both by governments that feel reluctant to invest in direct regulation (because of freedom of speech concerns or high costs of monitoring and enforcement) and by the industry that is under the threat of rising public concerns over content...

Fixed price payments for treatment of patients with a specified diagnosis are widespread in both US Medicare and the British NHS even though there are substantial variations in the cost of treatment. Theory suggests that, when there is asymmetric information about those costs, total payment can...

Incentive contracts for gatekeepers who control patient access to specialist medical services provide too weak incentives to investigate cost further when expected cost of treatment is greater than benefit. Making gatekeepers residual claimants with a fixed fee from which treatment costs must be...

This paper is largely motivated by the empirical observation that GP visits per person under the NHS have increased in England since the mid-1970s, while list sizes have decreased over the same period  A hypothesis consistent with this observation is that larger list sizes are associated with...

In 1984, the world was shocked at the scale of a famine in Ethiopia that caused over half a million deaths, making it one of the worst in recent history.  The mortality impacts are clearly significant.  But what of the survivors?  This paper provides the first estimates the long-term impact...

Using new and unique panel data, we investigate the role of long-term health and childhood malnutrition in schooling outcomes for children in rural India, many of whom lack basic numeracy and literacy skills.  Using data on students' performance on mathematics and Hindi tests, we examine the...

We show that psychological well-being in adulthood varies substantially with circumstance in early life.  Combining a time series of real producer prices of cocoa with a nationally representative household survey in Ghana, we find that a one standard deviation rise in the cocoa price in early...