Pro-life advocates focus on a single entity, the foetus. Pro-choice advocates focus on another single entity, the pregnant mother. There should also be a third focus, on all people already born on how a new entrant on average damages (or enhances) the whole community. Communal accounts are...

A rich economic literature has examined the human capital impacts of disease-eliminating health interventions, such as the rollout of new vaccines. This literature is based on reduced-form approaches which exploit proxies for disease burden, such as mortality, instead of actual infection counts,...

This paper examines the association between financial incentives and organ donations. Although the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 prohibits financial compensation for organs for transplant, the paper focuses on the impact of laws that influence the relative cost of deceased and live organ...

The use of the emergency departments as a regular source of sick care has been increasing, despite the fact that it is costly and is often an inappropriate source of care. This study examines factors associated with routine use of emergency departments by using a national sample of US children.

"One of the major social policy issues facing the U.S. in the first decade of the 21st century is the large number of Americans lacking health insurance. This article surveys the major economic issues around covering the uninsured. I review the facts on insurance coverage and the nature of the...

"Standard theories of insurance, dating from Rothschild and Stiglitz (1976), stress the role of adverse selection in explaining the decision to purchase insurance. In these models, higher risk people buy full or near-full insurance, while lower risk people buy less complete coverage, if they buy...

"Emphasizes the importance of universal health care and looks at alternatives for achieving universal health care coverage that also improves efficiency in the health care industry and provides proposals to improve the effectiveness and affordability of health care, including income-related...