The “question of reasonable compliance” concerns how business firms should comply with morally reasonable laws that have been democratically enacted. This article argues that, out of respect for the governing authority of democratic citizens, firms should comply with the law in accordance...

This paper argues in favor of the end user thesis, which holds that the fundamental goal of the firm is to create products and services that provide a benefit to the people who ultimately use them. The argument turns on the interest that employees have in work that is meaningful, in the sense...

Motivated by wide cross-sectional variations in intensity of care that are unrelated to patient outcomes, researchers and policymakers commonly claim that healthcare providers waste considerable re- sources, engaging in so-called “flat-of-the-curve (FOTC) medicine.” A key yet elusive...

Treatment practices vary widely across hospitals, often with little connection to the medical needs of patients. We assess impacts of these differences in childbirth, where there is broad interest in reducing cesarean deliveries. Using a distance-based design and data from half a million births,...

We study a 2008 policy reform in which Medicare revised its hospital payment system to better reflect patients' severity of illness. We construct a simulated instrument that predicts a hospital's policy-induced change in reimbursement using pre-reform patients and post-reform rules. The reform...

Cesarean delivery for low-risk pregnancies is generally associated with worse health outcomes for infants and mothers. The interpretation of this correlation, however, is confounded by potential selectivity in the choice of birth mode. We use birth records from California, merged with hospital...