This study examines the long term impact of Medicare payment reductions on patient outcomes using a natural experiment - the Balance Budget Act (BBA) of 1997. We use predicted Medicare revenue changes due to BBA, with simulated BBA payment cuts as an instrument, to categorize hospitals by...

While many jurisdictions ban teacher strikes on the assumption that they harm students, there is surprisingly little research on this question. The majority of existing studies make cross section comparisons of students who do or do not experience a strike, and report that strikes do not affect...

Public policies for pollution control, including climate change policies, sometimes allow polluters in one sector subject to an emissions cap to offset excessive emissions in that sector with pollution abatement in another sector. The government may often find it more costly to verify offset...

An extensive literature has documented a robust correlation between socioeconomic status--measured in a variety of ways--and health outcomes; however, much uncertainty remains regarding what causal processes underlie this association. The present paper builds on a growing literature that seeks...

Firms in the same industry can differ in measured productivity by multiples of 3. Griliches (1957) suggests one explanation: the quality of inputs differs across firms. We add labor market history variables such as experience and firm and industry tenure, as well as general human capital...

Are fluctuations in firms' profitability risk a major cause of regular business cycles? We study this question within the framework of a heterogeneous-firm dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with fixed capital adjustment costs. In such a model, surprise increases of risk lead to a...

Using peer-to-peer (P2P) lending as an example, we show that learning by doing plays an important role in alleviating the information asymmetry between market players. Although the P2P platform (Prosper.com) discloses part of borrowers' credit histories, lenders face serious information problems...

Set-asides and subsidies are used extensively in government procurement and natural resource sales. We analyze these policies in an empirical model of U.S. Forest Service timber auctions. The model fits the data well both within the sample of unrestricted sales where we estimate the model, and...

We identify a disconnect between historical and model-based assessments of the costs of currency pegs due to nominal rigidities. While the former attribute major contractions and massive unemployment to currency pegs, the latter find miniscule welfare losses. The goal of this paper is to...

This paper investigates whether the securitization of corporate bank loans had an impact on the price of corporate debt. Our results suggest that loan facilities that are subsequently securitized are associated with a 15 basis point lower spread than that of loans that are not subsequently...