The veterans disability compensation (VDC) program, which provides a monthly stipend to disabled veterans, is the third largest American disability insurance program. Since the late 1990s, VDC growth has been driven primarily by an increase in claims from Vietnam veterans, raising concerns about...

Policies aiming to improve healthcare productivity often focus on reducing care fragmentation. Care fragmentation occurs when services are spread across many providers, potentially making coordination difficult. Using Medicare claims data, we analyze the effect of moving to a region with more...

The veterans disability compensation (VDC) program, which provides a monthly stipend to disabled veterans, is the third largest American disability insurance program. Since the late 1990s, VDC growth has been driven primarily by an increase in claims from Vietnam veterans, raising concerns about...

Machine learning (ML) is mostly a predictive enterprise, while the questions of interest to labor economists are mostly causal. In pursuit of causal effects, however, ML may be useful for automated selection of ordinary least squares (OLS) control variables. We illustrate the utility of ML for...

We propose a test for the identifying assumptions invoked in designs based on random assignment to one of many "judges.'' We show that standard identifying assumptions imply that the conditional expectation of the outcome given judge assignment is a continuous function with bounded slope of the...