Over the last thirty years, the use of child safety seats in motor vehicles has increased dramatically, fueled by well publicized information campaigns and legal mandates. In spite of this movement, there is relatively little empirical evidence regarding the efficacy of child safety seats...

Measurement of seat belt and air bag effectiveness is complicated by the fact that systematic data are collected only for crashes in which a fatality occurs. These data suffer from sample selection since seat belt and air bag usage influences survival rates which in turn determine whether a...

Agents are often better informed than the clients who hire them and may exploit this informational advantage. Real-estate agents, who know much more about the housing market than the typical homeowner, are one example. Because real estate agents receive only a small share of the incremental...

Hurricane Katrina destroyed more than 200,000 homes and led to massive economic and physical dislocation. Using a panel of tax return data, we provide one of the first comprehensive analyses of the hurricane's long-term economic impact on its victims. Katrina had large and persistent impacts on...

Research on behavioral economics has established the importance of factors such as reference dependent preferences, hyperbolic discounting, and the value placed on non-financial rewards. To date, these insights have had little impact on the way the educational system operates. Through a series...

"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...

Birth order has been found to have a surprisingly large influence on educational attainment, yet much less is known about the role of birth order on delinquency outcomes such as disciplinary problems in school, juvenile delinquency, and adult crime: outcomes that carry significant negative...

Measuring physician quality is fundamental to understanding healthcare productivity, yet patient sorting can confound attempts to estimate the types of physicians that improve survival. This paper aims to overcome selection bias by exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the mix of...