The United States government spends billions on public health insurance and has funded a number of programs to build health care facilities. However, the government runs these two types of programs separately: in different places, at different times, and for different populations. We explore...

This paper studies how better access to public health insurance affects infant mortality during pandemics. Our analysis combines cross-state variation in mandated eligibility for Medicaid with two influenza pandemics - the 1957-58 "Asian Flu" pandemic and the 1968-69 "Hong Kong Flu" - that...

This paper proposes that the adoption of the modern U.S. mortgage (i.e., low down payment, long-term, and fixed-rate)--led by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and Veteran's Administration (VA) loan insurance programs--set the stage for the mid-twentieth century U.S. baby boom by...

This study examines the impact of tort reform on minority access to medical care. Past research has investigated tort reform, but this is the first study to consider minority healthcare access. I examine 261 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) from 1993-2000 to test the impact of non-economic...

We evaluate the effect of health insurance on the incidence of negative income shocks using the tax data and survey responses of nearly 14,000 low income households. Us-ing a regression discontinuity (RD) design and variation in the cost of nongroup pri-vate health insurance under the Affordable...

We investigate the impact of a large scale debt waiver program for small agricultural borrowers in India on the short term and long term consumption levels of the beneficiaries. We obtain consumption data from three national level surveys conducted before and after the waiver by a federal...

Germany has the lowest birth rate among all OECD countries. To encourage fertility, the federal government has recently introduced a set of reforms that led to a substantial expansion of public child care for under three year old children. Using administrative county-level data, we exploit...

Many countries impose job search requirements on unemployment benefit recipients. Existing studies have evaluated only incremental changes to requirements. Australian reforms in 1995 saw groups of welfare recipients newly subjected to job search requirements, allowing us to produce the first...

Many countries impose job search requirements on unemployment benefit recipients. Existing studies have evaluated only incremental changes to requirements. Australian reforms in 1995 saw groups of welfare recipients newly subjected to job search requirements, allowing us to produce the first...

We document heterogeneity in the evolution of income growth since the Great Recession. Using administrative data on the incomes of over 7 million households, we estimate the extent to which lower-income households began to catch-up with higher earners in two distinct phases: first, as the labor...