We estimate marginal returns to medical care for at-risk newborns by comparing health outcomes and medical treatment provision on either side of common risk classifications, most notably the "very low birth weight" threshold at 1500 grams. First, using data on the census of US births in...

Foster care provides substitute living arrangements to protect maltreated children. The practice is remarkably common: it is estimated that 5 percent of children in the United States are placed in foster care at some point during childhood. These children exhibit poor outcomes as children and...

Measuring physician quality is fundamental to understanding healthcare productivity, yet patient sorting can confound attempts to estimate the types of physicians that improve survival. This paper aims to overcome selection bias by exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the mix of...

Patient sorting can confound estimates of the returns to physician human capital. This paper compares nearly 30,000 patients who were randomly assigned to clinical teams from one of two academic institutions. One institution is among the top medical schools in the country, while the other...

Some gasoline markets exhibit remarkable price cycles, where price spikes are followed by a string of small price declines until the next price spike. This pattern is predicted from a model of competition driven by Edgeworth cycles, as described by Maskin and Tirole. We extend the Maskin and...

Health care spending varies widely across markets, yet there is little evidence that higher spending translates into better health outcomes, possibly due to endogeneity bias. The main innovation in this paper compares outcomes of patients who are exposed to different health care systems that...

Nearly 20% of young prison inmates spent part of their youth in foster care - the placement of abused or neglected children with substitute families. Little is known whether foster care placement reduces or increases the likelihood of criminal behavior. This paper uses the placement frequency of...

There are surprisingly few estimates of the effect of sales taxes on retail prices, especially at the firm level. Further, along both sides of a state border, a change in one state's sales tax can shed light on the nature of competition, as a subset of firms effectively experiences a change in...

Previous studies find that the uninsured receive less health care than the insured, yet differences in health outcomes have rarely been studied. In addition, selection bias may partly explain the difference in care received. This paper focuses on an unexpected health shock -- severe automobile...

In response to unsustainable growth in health care spending, there is enormous interest in reforming the payment system to "pay for quality instead of quantity." While quality measures are crucial to such reforms, they face major criticisms largely over the potential failure of risk adjustment...