"Young children are required to use child safety seats, and the age threshold at which children can legally graduate to seat belts has steadily increased. This article tests the relative effectiveness of child safety seats, lap-and-shoulder seat belts, and lap belts in preventing injuries among...

Many consumers who lack checking accounts are paying relatively high costs to access the nation's payments system. Legislation aimed at opening the system to these unbanked individuals has centered on requiring commercial banks to offer low-cost "lifeline" accounts. But will cost savings alone...

Young children are required to use child safety seats, and the age threshold at which children can legally graduate to seat belts has steadily increased. This paper tests the relative effectiveness of child safety seats, lap-and-shoulder seat belts, and lap belts in preventing injuries among...

Estimates of moral hazard in health insurance markets can be confounded by adverse selection. This paper considers a plausibly exogenous source of variation in insurance coverage for childbirth in California. We find that additional health insurance coverage induces substantial extensions in...

Health care spending varies widely across markets, and previous research finds little evidence that higher spending translates into better health outcomes. The main innovation in this paper exploits this cross-sectional variation in hospital spending in a new way by considering emergency...

In , we describe how marginal returns to medical care can be estimated by comparing patients on either side of diagnostic thresholds. Our application examines at-risk newborns near the very low birth weight threshold at 1500 g. We estimate large discontinuities in medical care and mortality at...

This paper describes the use of instrumental-variables (IV) to estimate causal effects of foster care on long- and short-term outcomes. This estimation strategy provides a tool to evaluate what are known as “natural experiments”: settings that mimic randomization usually associated with a...

Previous studies find that the uninsured receive less health care than the insured, yet differences in health outcomes have rarely been studied. In addition, selection bias may partly explain the difference in care received. This paper focuses on an unexpected health shock-severe automobile...

The standard principal-agent model neglects the potentially important role of information transmission from agent to principal. We study optimal incentive contracts when the agent has a private signal of the likelihood of the project's success. We show that the principal can costlessly extract...