The lack of universal deposit insurance coverage can create liquidity risk during financial crises. This aspect of deposit insurance is hard to test in modern data because of the broad coverage of most systems. We, therefore, study the role that the U.S. Postal Savings System played in...

Building and Loan Associations (B&Ls) financed over half of new houses constructed in the U.S. during the 1920s but they lost their predominance within the following decades as they were pushed to convert into Savings and Loans (S&Ls). This study examines whether the U.S. government-insured...

A primary rationale for public provision of K-12 education and state financing of school spending is that education fosters civic engagement and the development of social capital. However, limited evidence exists on whether and how school spending affects civic engagement. Virtually all studies...

Libraries have traditionally provided free communal access to books, facilitated by the first sale doctrine's (FSD) guarantee that libraries may purchase physical books at consumer prices. Increasingly restrictive ebook access terms may imperil libraries, and we compare the welfare cost of...

The nonprofit sector's ability to absorb increases in labor costs differs from the private sector in a number of ways. We analyze how nonprofits are affected by changes in the minimum wage utilizing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Internal Revenue Service, linked to state...

The United States spends twice as much per person on pharmaceuticals as European countries, in large part because prices are much higher in the US. This fact has led policymakers to consider legislation for price controls. This paper assesses the effects of a US international reference pricing...

We examine whether loss of emergency department services is associated with county-level mortality rates in rural areas over the period 2005-2018. We use a propensity-weighted difference-in-difference approach, comparing counties that lost emergency department services to counties that retained...

We study the effect of price caps on the provision of costly effort by pharmaceutical firms using variation in drug discounts generated by a price regulation program that allows eligible hospitals to purchase outpatient drugs at steep discounts. These discounts directly affect drug...

This study examines "tunneling" practices through which health care providers covertly extract profit by making inflated payments for goods and services to commonly-owned related parties. While incentives to tunnel exist across sectors, health care providers may find it uniquely advantageous to...

Since the inception of Medicare Part D in 2006, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and regulatory changes have led to increased concentration and reduced plan variety in the standalone prescription drug plan (PDP) portion of the market. We examine how this industry consolidation affects Medicare...