Consumerism arises when patients acquire and use medical information from sources apart from their physicians, such as the Internet and direct-to-patient advertising. Consumerism has been hailed as a means of improving quality. This need not be the result. Consumerist patients place additional...

Donald Trump's election and his nomination of Scott Pruitt, a climate skeptic, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency drastically downshifted expectations on US climate-change policy. We study firms' stock-price reactions and institutional investors' portfolio adjustments after these...

The Tax Cut and Jobs Act (TCJA) slashed corporations' median effective tax rates from 31.7% to 20.8%. Nevertheless, 15% of firms experienced an increase. One fifth of firms recorded nonrecurring tax costs or benefits exceeding 3% of total assets. Proxies that existing studies employ to assess...

Managers conducting earnings conference calls display distinctive styles in their word choice. Some CEOs and CFOs are straight talkers. Others, by contrast, are vague talkers. Vague talkers routinely use qualifying words indicating uncertainty, such as "approximately", "probably", or "maybe"....

Stock prices react significantly to the tone (negativity of words) managers use on earnings conference calls. This reaction reflects reasonably rational use of information. "Tone surprise" - the residual when negativity in managerial tone is regressed on the firm's recent economic performance...

A principal provides budgets to agents (e.g., divisions of a firm or the principal's children) whose expenditures provide her benefits, either materially or because of altruism. Only agents know their potential to generate benefits. We prove that if the more "productive" agents are also more...

Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) awards rise in recessions and fall in expansions, especially for older adults. Using Medicare administrative data for DI entrants between 1991 and 2015, we provide new evidence on the health of DI recipients who enter at different ages and points in the...

Policies aimed at reducing the harmful effects of air pollution exposure typically focus on areas with high levels of pollution. However, if a population's vulnerability to air pollution is imperfectly correlated with current pollution levels, then this approach to air quality regulation may not...

Caloric intake and minimum calorie thresholds are widely used in developing countries to assess hunger and nutrition, and to construct poverty lines. However, it is generally recognized that the sufficiency of an individual's caloric intake cannot be determined, due to: a lack of consensus on...

The recent reform of the U.S. health care system has been described both as a boon and a death blow for the healthcare industry and for private insurers in particular. We exploit the surprise election of Republican Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate, which dealt a serious blow to the prospects for...