In US vaccine markets, competing producers with high fixed, sunk costs face relatively concentrated demand. The resulting price and quality competition leads to the exit of all but one or very few producers per vaccine. Our empirical analysis of exits from US vaccine markets supports the...

Firms invest in scientific research to increase their chances of landing lucrative procurement contracts with the U.S. government. This is an important, but understudied channel through which the government encourages corporate research, particularly when other market mechanisms are...

We study Medicare's competitive bidding program (CBP) for durable medical equipment (DME). We exploit Medicare claims data to examine both prices and utilization, focusing on continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) devices to treat sleep apnea. We find that spending falls by 47.2% percent...

It is claimed that many regulatory rules enforce inefficiencies in order to achieve the appearance of cost control. We assess the importance of these claims by measuring the effect of New York state's compulsory multiple contractor law on the cost of public construction in New York City....

Adequate wages are an important tool to shield public officials from special interests and corruption. But what is the equilibrium effect of higher wages in the presence of criminal pressure groups, who use both bribes and violence? By means of a regression discontinuity design, we show that an...

There is limited evidence of behavioral changes resulting from electricity information feedback. Using a randomized control trial from a New York apartment building, we study long-term effects of information feedback from "Modlet" in-home devices, which provide near-real-time plug-level...

Smart-home technologies have been heralded as an important way to increase energy conservation. While in vitro engineering estimates provide broad optimism, little has been done to explore whether such estimates scale beyond the lab. We estimate the causal impact of smart thermostats on energy...

Obtaining better information on the quality of health care providers is one of the most pressing issues in health policy today. In this paper we (1) develop a new method for measuring quality of care that overcomes the key limitations of available quality measures, and (2) apply this method to...

Do not-for-profit hospitals provide better care than for-profit hospitals? We compare patient outcomes in for-profit and not-for-profit hospitals between 1984 and 1994 using a new method for estimating differences across hospitals that yields far more accurate estimates of hospital quality than...