Although physicians are often expected to be gatekeepers to health insurance benefits such as paid sick leave, research indicates a substantial reluctance to reject patient requests for sickness certificates. We show that private information on the patient's part creates a conflict between the...

We exploit lottery wins to investigate the effects of exogenous changes to individuals' income on health care demand in the United Kingdom. This strategy allows us to estimate lottery income elasticities for a range of health care services that are publicly and privately provided. The results...

We analyze voluntary private contributions to public goods and the role seed money plays in signaling the public good's quality to potential subsequent contributors. We present a theoretical model and analyze two sets of naturally occurring data from crowd-funding platforms. After developing the...

This study looks at the effects of participating in active labour market policy programs for persons with work disabilities. More in detail, it draws attention to the importance of taking into account the timing of when a work disability has been registered for persons attending ALMP programs....

Little literature currently exists on the effects of childcare use on maternal labor market outcomes in a developing country context, and the few recent studies offer mixed results. We attempt to fill these gaps by analyzing several latest rounds of the Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey...

Maddison's international panel data show that technically it was the faster growth rate of the US economy that led to its overtaking the UK as economic superpower. We explore the contributing factors. Identifying the land-grant colleges system triggered by the 1862/1890 Morrill Acts (MAs) as a...

Using the location of baroque opera houses as a natural experiment, Falck et al. (2011) claim to document a positive causal effect of the supply of cultural goods on today's regional distribution of talents. This paper raises serious doubts on the validity of the identification strategy...

This paper investigates the role of childcare provided by grandparents for the fertility decisions of their offspring. We exploit a decade of pension reforms in Italy that mandated the grandparental generation to a working horizon longer than they would have had otherwise. We argue that the rise...

This paper provides a political-economic model to study the impact of low-skilled immigration on the host country's education system, which is characterized by sources of school funding, the average expenditure per pupil, and the type of parents who are more likely to send their children to...

The problem of the uninsured - those eschewing the purchase of health insurance policies - cannot be fully understood without considering informal alternatives to market insurance called "self-insurance" and "self-protection", including the publicly and charitably-financed safety-net health care...