The authors find high but diminishing marginal returns to investment in expenditures per pupil per year. The study suggests the desirability of increased educational quality in school districts with lower per pupil expenditures so as to equalize the returns to years and annual expenditure per...

Private educational firms claimed to be able to substantially increase the reading and mathematics achievement test scores of disadvantaged students. The OEO Performance Contracting Experiment tested this claim. Although analysis of experimental effects is complicated by imperfect matching of...

Recent administration proposals to address the rising cost of Medicaid will do little to contain costs or truly reform the program. The primary issues are the large differences among state Medicaid programs in coverage and benefits and the programs high and rising costs. In this paper, we...

Individual states are actively weighing health care reform proposals and their potential impacts on many levels, including states' own economies. This article considers the effects on state economies of two instruments of health reform: employer mandates and cost containment. The literature...

The persistently large number of uninsured, roughly 40 million per year since 1993, continues to elicit bipartisan policy interest. Coverage-expansion proposals without mandates, by far the most common since the defeat of the Clinton plan, must address risk-pooling realities in private markets....