This study examines the benefits and costs of living around Kaziranga National Park (KNP), a protected area in Assam (India), by conducting a primary survey among the people who live in the neighboring villages. It finds no evidence of eviction or pecuniary punishment by the park authority...

In this paper we study the effect of the business cycle on the mortality rate of the major racial groups in the U.S. Using county-level data from 1999 to 2005, we find that the unemployment rate is negatively related to mortality for whites and latinos but that there is not a statistically...

This paper uses cross-state and cross-regional variation in both levels and growth rates of the shares of alcohol beverage types to ascertain the effect, if any of this variation on health outcomes related to excessive alcohol consumption, with particular focus on beer versus spirits (“hard...

The National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 exemplifies high-stakes legislation that attracted the interest of the public, legislators, academics, policy advocates, and executive agencies. This paper explores how these actors combined to generate intellectual support for this act within the...

In this study we estimate technical efficiency of Indian commercial banks from 1989- 2009 using a multiple-output generalized stochastic production frontier, and analyze the effects of financial sector reforms on measured efficiency. This generalized technique estimates technical efficiency in...

This paper replicates Gruber, Kim, and Mayzlin’s (1999) analysis of the effect of physician financial incentives on cesarean delivery rates, using their data, sample selection criteria, and specification. Coincident trends explain much of their estimated positive relation between fees and...

The expected penalty for drunk driving can and does vary by blood alcohol content. This paper outlines the "penalty structure" that does this optimally, using two different metrics, shows how the optimality conditions can be implemented with available data to analyze policy ex ante or ex post,...

This paper re-examines the effectiveness of Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) and Administrative License Revocation (ALR) laws in reducing traffic fatalities. Using difference-in-differences estimators of U.S. state-level data with standard errors corrected for autocorrelation, we find no evidence...

This paper uses high frequency exchange rate data for a group of twelve Latin American countries to analyze volatility comovements. Particular interest is posed on understanding the existence of a common volatility process during the 1994–2005 period. The analysis relies on bivariate common...