We study the effects of competition by state-owned firms, leveraging the decentralized entry of public pharmacies to local markets in Chile. Public pharmacies sell the same drugs at a third of private pharmacy prices, because of stronger upstream bargaining and market power in the private...

Concurrent with the precipitous decline in private sector unionization over the past half century, there has been a shift in the type of work covered by unions. We take a skill-based approach to studying this shift, using data from the Current Population Survey combined with occupation-specific...

The paper examines whether, among inpatient psychiatric admissions in California, for-profit (FP) hospitals engage in cream skimming, i.e., choosing patients for some characteristic(s) other than their need for care, which enhances the profitability of the provider. We propose a novel approach...

Stronger enforcement of discrimination laws can help to reduce disparities in economic outcomes with respect to race, ethnicity, and gender in the United States. However, the data necessary to detect possible discrimination and to act to counter it is not publicly available - in particular, data...

To develop new evidence on the effects of hospital ownership and other aspects of hospital market composition on health care productivity, we analyze longitudinal data on the medical expenditures and health outcomes of the vast majority of nonrural elderly Medicare beneficiaries hospitalized for...

In this paper, we consider a number of issues regarding crime prevention and criminal justice. We begin by considering how crime is measured and present both general and specific evidence on the level of crime in a variety of countries. Crime is pervasive and varies substantially across...

Private financing of care can make universal entitlement to care more comprehensive' and complete.' The possible combination -- at the point of service provision -- of privately acquired entitlement with the public entitlement, can impinge, however, upon the goals (e.g. improved health, equity,...

Some public goods are provided entirely with private contributions, others with a mixture of public and private funding, and still others are entirely publicly funded. To explain this variation, a model of dual provision is developed that endogenizes public and private funding. Members of the...

In this paper we analyze the recent efforts of the international financial institutions to limit the moral hazard created by their assistance to crisis countries. We question the wisdom of the case-by-case approach taken in Pakistan, Ecuador, Romania and Ukraine. We show that because default and...

Is public R&D spending complementary and thus "additional" to private R&D spending, or does it substitute for and tend to "crowd out" private R&D? Conflicting answers are given to this question. We survey the body of available economectric evidence accumulated over the past 35 years. A framework...