In this article, we show that a small innovation in inspection technology can make substantial differences in inspection outcomes. For restaurant hygiene inspections, the state of Florida has introduced a handheld electronic device, the portable digital assistant (PDA), which reminds inspectors...

Protecting the environment during economic growth is a challenge facing every country. This paper focuses on two regulatory measures that China has adopted to incentivize air quality improvement: publishing a daily air pollution index (API) for major cities since 2000 and linking the API to...

Pharmaceutical products can be of poor quality either because they contain zero correct active ingredient (referred to as "counterfeit") or because they contain a non-zero but incorrect amount of the right active ingredient (referred to as "substandard"). While both types of poor-quality drugs...

We examine the effect of direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) of drug treatment on an important health habit, physical exercise. By learning the existence of a new drug treatment via DTCA, rational consumers may become careless about maintaining healthy lifestyles. Using the National Health...

Increased competition from the Internet has raised a concern of product quality for online prescription drugs. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) prohibits the importation of unapproved drugs into the US and the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP) emphasizes their illegality...

Using 2006 China Agricultural Census (CAC), we examine whether the introduction of the New Cooperative Medical System (NCMS) has affected child mortality, maternal mortality, and school enrollment of the 6-16 years olds. Our data cover 5.9 million people living in eight low-income rural...

This paper uses an audit sample and a consumer survey to study the intriguing market of online prescription drugs facing US customers, and assesses the role that certification agencies play in online drug markets. On the supply side, we acquire samples of five popular brand-name prescription...

Focusing on 8 drug types on the WHO-approved medicine list, we constructed an original dataset of 899 drug samples from 17 low- and median-income countries and tested them for visual appearance, disintegration, and analyzed their ingredients by chromatography and spectrometry. Fifteen percent of...