Consumers, when buying health insurance, do not know the exact value of each treatment that they buy coverage for. This leads them to overvalue some treatments and undervalue others. We show that the insurance market cannot correct these mistakes. This causes research labs to overinvest in...

We estimate the effect of binge drinking on accident and emergency attendances, road accidents, arrests, and the number of police officers on duty using a variety of unique data from Britain and a two-sample minimum distance estimation procedure. Our estimates, which reveal sizeable effects of...

Abstract We evaluate the impact of a policing experiment that depenalized the possession of small quantities of cannabis in the London borough of Lambeth, on hospital admissions related to illicit drug use. To do so, we exploit administrative records on individual hospital admissions classified...

We use the time series of shifts in U.S. Federal tax liabilities constructed by Romer and Romer to estimate tax multipliers. Differently from the single-equation approach adopted by Romer and Romer, our estimation strategy (a Var that includes output, government spending and revenues, inflation...

Does fiscal consolidation lead to social unrest? Using cross-country evidence for the period 1919 to 2008, we examine the extent to which societies become unstable after budget cuts. The results show a clear correlation between fiscal retrenchment and instability. We test if the relationship...

This paper shows how the richer frequency and variety of fiscal policy shocks available in an international sample can be analyzed recognizing the heterogeneity that exists across different countries. The main conclusion of our empirical analysis is that the question 'what is the fiscal policy...

This paper compares constraints on the public debt with constraints on the primary deficit. The analysis takes into account how an optimizing government reacts to the different constraints when deciding on a spending and borrowing plan. We find that the economy behaves similarly under both...

We discuss sources of volatility and vulnerability in the CEECs during the transition and leading up to EU accession. The Paper emphasizes the role of the transition shock as a source of extreme volatility on a much larger scale than the one observed during crises in emerging markets. The low...

From 1970 to 1985, Israel experienced high inflation. It rose in three jumps to new plateaus and eventually exceeded 400% per annum. This paper claims that anticipated monetary and fiscal effects of a massive government bailout of owners of fallen bank shares caused the last big jump in...

A central tenet of the Maastricht Treaty is that a successful European Monetary Union requires sustainable public finances of its member states. Yet there is no clear definition of sustainability. The economist’s common use of the term builds on the concept of an intertemporal budget...