Anemia impairs physical and cognitive development in children and reduces human capital accumulation. The prior economics literature has focused on the role of inadequate nutrition in causing anemia. This paper is the first to show that sanitation, a public good, significantly contributes to...

In this paper, we shed new light on a long-standing puzzle: In India, Muslim children are substantially more likely than Hindu children to survive to their first birthday, even though Indian Muslims have lower wealth, consumption, educational attainment, and access to state services. Contrary to...

We study how extreme temperature exposure impacts infant survival in the developing world. Our analysis overcomes the absence of vital registration systems in many poor countries, which has been a limiting factor in the temperature-mortality literature, by extracting birth histories from...

Close elections are important for many reasons, including that consequent election disputes can weaken democratic legitimacy and risk political violence. We show that, in theoretical principle, either a popular vote or a two-stage electoral system, such as the US Electoral College (EC), could...

Many employers have implemented dependent verification (DV) programs, which aim to reduce employee benefits costs by ensuring that ineligible persons are not enrolled in their health plan as dependents. We evaluate a DV program using a panel of health plan enrollment data from a large,...

We examine the impact of educational attainment on fertility and mating market outcomes. Using a regression discontinuity design, we exploit an extension of the compulsory schooling age from 15 to 16 in 1972 in the UK. The change was binding for a quarter of the population. Simple plots of the...

Exploiting random assignment of Medicaid beneficiaries to managed care plans, we identify plan-specific effects on healthcare utilization. Auto-assignment to the lowest-spending plan generates 30% lower spending than if the same enrollee were assigned to the highest-spending plan, despite...

We study insurers' use of prescription drug formularies to screen consumers in the ACA Health Insurance Exchanges. We begin by showing that Exchange risk adjustment and reinsurance succeed in neutralizing selection incentives for most, but not all, consumer types. A minority of consumers,...

A central question in the debate over privatized Medicare is whether increased government payments to private Medicare Advantage (MA) plans generate lower premiums for consumers or higher profits for producers. Using difference-in-differences variation brought about by a sharp legislative...

In many markets, including the new U.S. Exchanges, health insurance plans are paid by risk-adjusted capitation, in some markets combined with reinsurance and other payment mechanisms. This paper proposes three metrics for analyzing the insurer incentives embedded in these complex payment...