Funds of funds are an increasingly popular avenue for hedge fund investment. Despite the increasing interest in hedge funds as an alternative asset class, the high degree of fund specific risk and the lack of transparency may give fiduciaries pause. In addition, many of the most attractive hedge...

High and increasing hospital prices have led to calls for price regulation. If prices are high because of consolidation, regulating prices could enhance welfare. However, high prices could also reflect increased willingness to pay by privately insured consumers for clinical and non-clinical...

Despite the popularity of pay-for-performance (P4P) among health policymakers and private insurers as a tool for improving quality of care, there is little empirical basis for its effectiveness. We use data from published performance reports of physician medical groups contracting with a large...

Working with a sizeable, anonymous money manager, we randomly make available for lending two-thirds of the high-loan fee stocks in the manager's portfolio and withhold the other third to produce an exogenous shock to loan supply. We implement the lending experiment in two independent phases: the...

This paper brings new evidence from the privatized social security system in Mexico, offering insight into investment behavior and the efficacy of government "nudges" in the context of profit maximizing firms. We use administrative data from the social security system surrounding the government...

This paper examines a cost-reducing innovation to the delivery of "Self-Help Group" microfinance services. These groups typically rely on outside agents to found and administer the groups although funds are raised by the group members. The innovation is to have the agents earn their payment by...

This paper documents uniformity in real estate commission rates across markets and time using a dataset on realtor commissions for 653,475 residential listings in eastern Massachusetts from 1998-2011. Newly established real estate brokerage offices charging low commissions grow more slowly than...

The paper investigates whether patent fees are an effective mechanism to deter the filing of low-quality patent applications. The study analyzes the effect on patent quality of the Patent Law Amendment Act of 1982, which resulted in a substantial increase in patenting fees at the U.S. Patent and...

Although doctors and hospitals own their patients' medical records, state and federal laws require that they provide patients with a copy at "reasonable cost." We examine the effects of state laws that cap the fees that doctors and hospitals are allowed to charge patients for a copy of their...

This paper considers how six alternative rebate rules affect voluntary contributions in a threshold public-good experiment. The rules differ by (1) whether an individual can receive a proportional rebate of excess contributions, a winner-takes-all of any excess contributions, or a full rebate of...