Democrats and liberals are generally understood to be more caring and kind than Republicans and conservatives; for example, even conservative author and media personality Ben Wattenberg has acknowledged that "the word ‘conservative’ conjures up images of the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, while...

Recent empirical studies from across the social and behavioral sciences find that social capital is associated with various measures of well-being, including economic growth (Stephen Knack and Phillip Keefer 1997) and mortality (Ichiro Kawachi, Bruce P. Kennedy and Kimberly Lochner 1997). These...

We examine the extent to which religious affiliation and participation are associated with other-regarding behavior in canonical public goods and bi-lateral trust games. In general, religious affiliation is unrelated to behavior in these experiments; further, there is only weak evidence that...

Prior studies suggest that hospital care is countercyclical among Medicare beneficiaries, and if anything, procyclical among the non-elderly. In this paper, we provide the first physician-level analysis of changes in healthcare provision to Medicare and privately insured patients across the...

Several non-experimental studies claim that heterogeneity among individuals reduces trust. A few experimental studies have examined the effects of naturally-occurring differences among subjects on trusting behavior, and in contrast, most have not supported these claims. We adopt a novel approach...

Effective in 2000, Medicare’s Outpatient Prospective Payment System (OPPS) sets pre-determined reimbursement rates for hospital outpatient services, replacing the prior costbased methods of reimbursement. Using Florida outpatient discharge data, we study the effect of OPPS on hospital...