We examine the impact of air pollution on infant death in California over the 1990s. Our work offers several innovations: First, many previous studies examine populations subject to far greater levels of pollution. In contrast, the experience of California in the 1990s is clearly relevant to...

This paper uses longitudinal micro-evidence from the European Community Household Panel to investigate the obesity phenomenon in nine EU countries from 1998 to 2001. The author documents cross-country prevalence, trends and cohort-age profiles of obesity among adults and analyses the...

The Wisconsin BadgerCare program, which became operational in July 1999, expanded public health insurance eligibility to families with incomes below 185 percent of the U.S poverty line (200 percent for those already enrolled). This eligibility expansion was part of a federal initiative known as...

The question we address in this paper is which factors influence the quitting decision of public sector teachers in England and Wales, using a nationally representative panel data set over 1997-2003. We document the outcomes of former teachers, fit single and competingrisks duration models and...

There is currently a worldwide shortage of registered nurses, driven by large shifts in both the demand for and supply of nurses. Consequently, various policies to increase the recruitment and retention of nurses are under discussion, in particular, the role that wage increases might have in...

We connect the recent medical and economic literatures on the long-run effects of early-life conditions, by analyzing the effects of economic conditions on the individual cardiovascular (CV) mortality rate later in life, using individual data records from the Danish Twin Registry covering births...

The context of community-based interventions presents formidable problems for any evaluation analysis. Group-randomized studies do possess ideal properties in theory, but in practice, group- randomization might not be a feasible alternative at all or group-randomized studies might be...

Most organ transplants are from dead donors. National transplant organizations exhibit considerable differences in terms of their donor population rates. Spain’s organization is by far the most efficient in this respect. We argue that much of the productivity advantage of Spain’s transplant...

Improving accountability in public services has been a central objective of many public sector reforms in recent years. Chief among these have been efforts to generate observable performance measures as a basis for monitoring performance. This paper examines a natural experiment in regimes...

In The Great Lead Water Pipe Disaster, Werner Troesken looks at a long-running environmental and public health catastrophe: 150 years of lead pipes in local water systems and the associated sickness, premature death, political inaction, and social denial. The harmful effects of lead water pipes...