Life expectancy in the United States fares poorly in international comparisons, primarily because of high mortality rates above age 50. Its low ranking is often blamed on a poor performance by the health care system rather than on behavioral or social factors. This paper presents evidence on the...

Does Canada's publicly funded, single payer health care system deliver better health outcomes and distribute health resources more equitably than the multi-payer heavily private U.S. system? We show that the efficacy of health care systems cannot be usefully evaluated by comparisons of infant...

The history of foreign development assistance is one of movement away from addressing immediate needs and toward focusing on the underlying causes of poverty. A recent manifestation is the move towards sustainability,' which stresses community mobilization, education, and cost-recovery. This...

Intestinal helminths - including hookworm, roundworm, schistosomiasis, and whipworm - infect more than one-quarter of the world's population. A randomized evaluation of a project in Kenya suggests that school-based mass treatment with deworming drugs reduced school absenteeism in treatment...

The retail clinic is an innovation that has the potential to improve competition in health care markets. Given concern about inefficient use of the emergency room (ER) increasing health care costs, we use all ER visits in New Jersey from 2006-2014 to examine the impact of retail clinics on ER...

Air pollution is known to negatively affect a range of health outcomes. Wildfire smoke is an increasingly important contributor to air pollution, yet extreme smoke events are highly salient and could induce behavioral responses that alter health impacts. We combine geolocated data covering the...

A large literature has documented links between harmful early life exposures and later life health and socioeconomic deficits. These studies, however, are typically unable to examine the possibility that these shocks are transmitted to the next generation. Our study traces the impacts of in...

This paper examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on employment and respiratory health for remote workers (i.e. those who can work from home) and non-remote workers in the United States. Using a large, nationally-representative, high-frequency panel dataset from March through July of 2020,...

We leverage a natural experiment, where a large national automotive racing organization switched from leaded to unleaded fuel, to study how ambient lead exposure and nutrition impact learning in elementary school. The average race emitted more than 10 kilograms of lead -- a quantity similar to...