Background: The increased use of medical therapies has led to increased medical costs. To provide insight into the value of this increased spending, we compared gains in life expectancy with the increased costs of care from 1960 through 2000. Methods: We estimated life expectancy in 1960, 1970,...

Background: The question of whether neighborhood environment contributes directly to the development of obesity and diabetes remains unresolved. The study reported on here uses data from a social experiment to assess the association of randomly assigned variation in neighborhood conditions with...

Intertemporal choices are decisions with consequences that play out over time. These choices range from the prosaic–-how much food to eat at a meal– to life--changing decisions about education, marriage, fertility, health behaviors and savings. Intertemporal preferences also affect...

Bayesian consumers infer that hidden add-on prices (e.g., the cost of ink for a printer) are likely to be high prices. If consumers are Bayesian, firms will not shroud information in equilibrium. However, shrouding may occur in an economy with some myopic (or unaware) consumers. Such shrouding...

The shortage of transplant kidneys has spurred debate about legalizing monetary payments to donors to increase the number of available kidneys. However, buying and selling organs faces widespread disapproval. We survey a representative sample of Americans to assess disapproval for several forms...

Following legal realists, we model the causes and consequences of trial judges exercising discretion in finding facts in a trial. We identify two motivations for the exercise of such discretion: judicial policy preferences and judges’ aversion to reversal on appeal when the law is...

Most transplanted kidneys are from cadavers, but there are also many transplants from live donors. Recently, there have started to be kidney exchanges involving two donor-patient pairs such that each donor cannot give a kidney to the intended recipient because of immunological incompatibility,...

Objective Black and Hispanic individuals synthesize less vitamin D per unit of sun exposure than white individuals. The relationship between UV radiation and vitamin D insufficiency in minorities has not been well explored. Design Prospective cohort study. Setting Using the National Health and...

In traditional reputation models, the ability to build a reputation is good for the long-run player. In [Ely, J., Valimaki, J., 2003. Bad reputation. NAJ Econ. 4, 2; http://www.najecon.org/v4.htm. Quart. J. Econ. 118 (2003) 785–814], Ely and Valimaki give an example in which reputation is...