We examine the impact of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on medical liability and the controversy over whether medical liability reforms could make a useful contribution to health care reform. By providing guaranteed access and renewal at community rates, the ACA could reduce the problem of...

Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi have adopted medical malpractice reform legislation in response to the three crises in medical liability insurance. In 1975, Louisiana adopted damages caps, created a patient compensation fund, and mandated the submission of claims to screening panels. In...

A 2005 survey reveals that U.S. health economists spend approximately 55 percent of their professional time on research. Assistant, associate and full professors, on average, reported publishing 8.8, 17.0 and 22.1 peer reviewed papers, respectively, over the past five years. Non-academic health...

The apparent effects of beer taxes, workers' compensation rules, and other factors on reported rates of lost work-days due to injury are estimated. The data used are for injury rates for two-digit SIC industries at the state-level pooled over 1975-85. The results indicate that higher beer tax...

After teenage males, elderly individuals have the highest per capita motor vehicle fatality rate in the United States. Surprisingly, there has been only limited work examining the effect of state motor vehicle laws on older driver fatalities. This paper uses state-level data from the 1985-2000...

Fatal motor vehicle crashes per capita remained relatively stable over the 1990s, in spite of new traffic safety laws and vehicle innovations. One explanation for this stability is that the price of gasoline declined, which resulted in more vehicle miles traveled and potentially more fatalities....

In this paper we discuss the potential role capital markets will play in health care restructuring. According to theory, agency costs, asymmetric information and strategic interactions cause the cost of capital for nonprofit entities to slope upward. Freestanding nonprofits are particularly...