Central governments or the international community at large are concerned about subnational service delivery. The design of targeted expenditure programs features frequently in central efforts to redistribute infrastructure and social spending or assure minimum standards. These programs are...

This dissertation is two essays that examine the impact of two distinct structural changes in hospitals. The first essay examines whether legislated changes in the minimum postpartum length of stay improve health outcomes for newborns. The second essay examines the consequences of nurse unions...

As health care consumes a growing share of GDP, the demand for better evidence regarding the effects of health care treatments and how these vary across individuals is increasing. Estimating this with observational data is difficult given the endogeneity of treatment decisions. But because the...

The ordinary least squares estimator of the effect of concentration on price is biased for two reasons. First, performance feeds back into structure, causing a simultaneous equations bias. Second, as a function of outputs or revenues, measured concentration is correlated with determinants of...

Taylor's series and logarithmic estimates of health state-dependent utility functions both imply that job injuries reduce one's utility and marginal utility of income, thus rejecting the monetary loss equivalent formulation. Injury valuations have unitary income elasticity, and the valuation of...

Research on the labor-supply consequences of childbearing is complicated by the endogeneity of fertility. This study uses parental preferences for a mixed sibling-sex composition to construct instrumental variables (IV) estimates of the effect of childbearing on labor supply. IV estimates for...

This paper examines empirically the effects of multimarket contact on pricing in the U.S. airline industry. The analysis of the time-series and cross-sectional variability of airline fares in the 1,000 largest domestic city-pair routes reveals the presence of statistically significant and...

Differences in test scores of white and black students have narrowed substantially over time, falling by one-half since 1970s. Some have speculated that this convergence is due to changes in family background or convergence in school quality. In this article we decompose the convergence in test...

Individuals or households often have some scope for choice of peer groups, whether through the selection of neighborhood of residence, school, or friends. This study addresses the estimation of peer group effects in cases in which measures of peer group influence are potentially endogenous...