Unlike in the production of most goods, changes in capacity for labor-intensive services only affect outcomes of interest insofar as service providers change the way they allocate their time in response to those capacity changes. In this paper, we examine how public sector service providers...

Roughly one half of hospitals in the U.S. are in rural areas, yet researchers have largely studied the effects of hospital ownership in the urban context. We examine differences in the provision of profitable and unprofitable medical services in rural areas across nonprofit, for-profit, and...

Several studies based on US and UK data have used market value as an indicator of the firm''s expected R&D performance. However, there exist no investigations for the continental countries in the European Union, partly because the analysis is complicated by data availability problems. In this...

This paper reexamines differences found between income gradients in American and English children's health, in results originally published by Case, Lubotsky and Paxson (2002) for the US, and by Currie, Shields and Wheatley Price (2007) for England. We find that, when the English sample is...

The effect of competition on the quality of health care remains a contested issue. Most empirical estimates rely on inference from non experimental data. In contrast, this paper exploits a pro-competitive policy reform to provide estimates of the impact of competition on hospital outcomes. The...

Improving the long-term life outcomes of disadvantaged youth remains a top policy priority in the United States, although identifying successful interventions for adolescents - particularly males - has proven challenging. This paper reports results from a large randomized controlled trial of an...

This note considers a relatively new form of financing for social services, the "Social Impact Bond." Proponents of Social Impact Bonds argue that they present a solution to several problems in funding social services, including performance measurement and the distribution of risk. Using a...

Objectives: This study estimates the value that clients place on drug rehabilitation services at the time of intake and how this value varies with the probability of success and availability of social services.Methods: We interviewed 241 heroin users who had been referred to, but had not yet...

Interest in religious organizations as providers of social services has increased dramatically in recent years. Churches in the U.S. were a crucial provider of social services through the early part of the twentieth century, but their role shrank dramatically with the expansion in government...

This study focuses on network effects' in the utilization of publicly funded prenatal care using Vital Statistics data from California for 1989 to 2000. Networks are defined using 5-digit zipcodes and a woman's racial or ethnic group. Like others, we find evidence that the use of public programs...