The focus on efficiency costs in the empirical literature on Disability Insurance (DI) provides a misleading view of the adequacy of payment levels. In order to evaluate whether workers are over- or under-insured through the social insurance program, we develop a framework that allows us to...

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...

Conflicting theories of the nonprofit firm have existed for several decades yet empirical research has not resolved these debates, partly because the theories are not easily testable but also because empirical research generally considers organizations in isolation rather than in markets. Here...

Does the safety net reduce food insecurity in families? In this paper we investigate how the structure of benefits for five major safety net programs - TANF, SSI, EITC, food assistance, and Medicaid - affects low food security in families. We build a calculator for the years 2001-2009 to impute...

Over the last several decades, both delay of childbearing and fertility problems have become increasingly common among women in developed countries. At the same time, technological changes have made many more options available to individuals experiencing fertility problems. However, these...

Current education reform proposals involve improving educational outcomes through forms of market-based competition and expanded parental choice. In this paper, we explore the impact of choice through open enrollment within the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Roughly half of the students within...

In this paper, we examine whether expanded access to sought-after schools can improve academic achievement. The setting we study is the "open enrollment" system in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). We use lottery data to avoid the critical issue of non-random selection of students into schools....

Entrepreneurial activity is presumed to generate important spillovers, potentially justifying tax subsidies. How does the tax law affect individual incentives? How much of an impact has it had in practice? We first show theoretically that taxes can affect the incentives to be an entrepreneur due...

Student disability rates have grown by over 50 percent over the past two decades and are continuing to rise. Policy discussion has linked this trend to state funding formulas that reward local school districts for identifying additional students with special needs. However, there is little...

This paper demonstrates that rising crime rates in cities are correlated with city depopulation. Instrumental variables estimates, using measures of the certainty and severity of a state?s criminal justice system as instruments for city crime rates, imply that the direction of causality runs...