This article provides an analysis and critique of tax penalties affecting employers and individuals in the Affordable Care Act. After an overview of the Act and its intended role in addressing problems in the health insurance system, the article turns to examine the employer and individual...

This paper studies the short-term impact of public smoking bans on hospitalizations in Germany. It exploits the staggered implementation of smoking bans over time and across the 16 federal states along with the universe of hospitalizations from 2000-2008 and daily county-level weather and...

This paper studies the short-term impact of public smoking bans on hospitalizations in Germany. It exploits the staggered implementation of smoking bans over time and across the 16 federal states along with the universe of hospitalizations from 2000-2008 and daily county-level weather and...

Paid maternity leave has gained greater salience in the past few decades as mothers have increasingly entered the workforce. Indeed, the median number of weeks of paid leave to mothers among OECD countries was 14 in 1980, but had risen to 42 by 2011. We assess the case for paid maternity leave,...

We examine the effect of the Medicaid expansions under the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) on consumer, financial outcomes using data from a major credit reporting agency for a large, national sample of adults. We employ the synthetic control method to compare individuals...

Reconciling work and family is high on many governments' agenda, especially in countries, such as Spain, with record-low fertility and female labor force participation rates. This paper analyzes the effects of a large-scale provision of publicly subsidized child care in Spain in the early 1990s,...

We investigate the role of grandparental childcare for fertility decisions of their offspring. Exploiting pension reforms in Italy, we argue that delayed retirement represents a negative shock to the supply of informal childcare for the next generation. We show that, when the maternal...

The issues of privatization (and sometimes deregulation) have been reviewed in a large literature on the various aspects of privatization, that has emphasized the potential efficiency gains. Hence, we provide some theoretical reasoning why privatization is useful as well as profitable for an...

Paid maternity leave has gained greater salience in the past few decades as mothers have increasingly entered the workforce. Indeed, the median number of weeks of paid leave to mothers among OECD countries was 14 in 1980, but had risen to 42 by 2011. We assess the case for paid maternity leave,...